Of times hair and mccain once said about words that words arent simply a piece of communication and element of communication. Just because its not in the dictionary doesnt mean its not a word. That is to say you dont need a pedigree to be a dog. Thats sort of the way to look at it but one thing that i find this interesting is a lot of writers especially contemporary writers love to create their own words. My favorite example is Calvin Trillin the humorist and new yorker writer. He actually created a couple of words which i give them full credit for. Wonky as one and the other is the buffalo chicken wings which were called before that spicy chicken wings and when he wrote the book called alice let eat they become buffalo chicken wings because he had them in buffalo new york when he was on a pilgrimage about food. The guy that is funny to me is when i was doing research on the book i found Sinclair Lewis would invent words and send off letters to merriamwebster. The letters are in files up there. He would come up with a word like the great words he thought he had created worth t. Totalitarian for people who were dry during prohibition and then the robber baron. His favorite was kipling go which was for the overblown purple language of roger kipling. And of course kipling had some amazing words. Kipling in the book was the horrible racism. White mans burden was kipling and his example of how the kind of person he was but also on the brighter side he invented the word rookie which is a corruption of recruit. Recruit didnt rhyme for him so rookie went in instead. The thing about lewis was sorted to his chagrin the two words he is credited with is a character nam for a philistine with money and no appreciation of the finer things of life. The arts and such and of course at shotgun wedding appears in the writings of Sinclair Lewis. He needed a name for a forced wedding in arra setting so shot gun wedding made it in. I tried a bunch of words. I probably tried about 100 and only two have stuck to the wall. Maybe authorisms was created for this one. Theres a phenomenon in english called the contrastive focused reduplication. That means if you say was he talking about a book or a book book meaning is he talking about a physical book or an ebook or is he talking about grass or grass grass meaning the difference between marijuana and lawn clippings. So one time i called these world words. I completely knocked it out of the dictionary. In the newest edition of the oxford gets in there as a form of speech, go word word. Tonight if you go and send some mail or some male male, email. Another one i created with the help of some dictionary people was the noun or adjective for a person or a place of where person comes from. Someone from liverpool or washingtonian or hoosier for someone from indiana. That seems to be sticking but a lot of people use that as their final arbiter whether you have created a word or not and its interesting if you go to the oxford dictionary the Oxford English dictionardictionar y says i was the first one to use it in the english language. Now they are fairly dubious. One i am credited with is water picked as a verb and a piece of fiction i once wrote i said soandso woke up in the morning and the water picked his teeth. Somehow they laid that on me and i have no responsibility for it. They also laid on me strange levy and an adjective pertaining to the world of dr. Strangelove. The whole dr. Strangelove phenomenon. Then theres another one a body part turned into a verb which i will probably not to mention given the cameras are rolling. And im credited with that and it was not mine either. My favorite one is Phyllis Richmond is an old friend of mine who is a writer and the food editor of the Washington Post for many years. She is hounded at the fact that she is credited worldwide with creating the word comfort or the word phrase comfort food. We had lunch one day and discuss the subject and of course she was eating macaroni and cheese or some comforts through the food as we spoke. She said she didnt than that and she was all over the Food Industry when she wrote it in 1977 piece in the post magazine. She talked about restaurants specializing in comfort food which was bacon let us and tomato sandwiches and things made with ice cream combat rings that were not cuisine but the cuisine you would eat when you are feeling out of sorts. But she did say at lunch and shes adamant about this the word she did create was alec annan dress. She said she started using it in high school and she put it on paper. She said all through college and occasionally threw it into a column. It was enacted to that meant nothing at she said nobody ever challenger. She wants me to do everything i can to make sure that alec annan dress gets going. What got me going on this was interesting. The English Dictionary now that its digitized you can now set it up to look for what you want. There was one way i could look and find out who were the great word creators. In other words who created the most words . And terms are first use but also first use is not a given but its a strong suggestion that is where the term came from. They spent over 100 years trying to determine where it first appears in print. What is really interesting is i ran into who the great creators were of language and number one was shakespeare but number two was Sir Walter Scott. They said what about Sir Walter Scott and i got fascinated by scott. I came to this conclusion that what scott did was create this world of chivalry and ability and the lost causes and the world in which there were plans. What he was creating was a world that had words in it like freelance and words in it like back and beyond or phrases. Then i stumbled upon something very interesting which is marked twine in longford mississippi attacks god and one of the things he later commits is one of the reasons he wrote King Arthurs Court was to mock the world that scott had created. Twain goes almost overboard in this. He believed that scott had created a world or nobility of lost causes a nobility of dying the graceful and courageous death that was a proximate cause of the civil war. And twain goes on for paragraphs showing why he thinks the popularity of scott especially in the south was that powerful. There brings true in only one sense that the power of scott was amazing. Garrett of the bn dobro road account was set up like a village originally and every street and every physical aspect of the town is from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Of course god created this world with characters like robin hood and the sheriff of nottingham and ivanhoe. Then i got interested in playing. I said duane claimed in his lifetime he never created a word. He did. Hardboiled which is one thats on the cover but twain and brad harp were fascinating in the sense that they created they are the words that are attributed to twain. Things like peter out. Rub steaks, blowout and emotional blowout bonanza etc. And twain said he got this new language from being on the mississippi but also the minds of nevada california where he got a huge amount of this slang. He said it was the most powerful slang he had ever seen came out of the gold rush and such. The more i looked at dickens i realize dickens had another word that he created. His world was a world of a lowlife. Dickens had this ability to see see theres this slang of the slums of london and paris. Ecn dickens said dickens was in the great creator of language but was one that picked up the language of the people and the places he had been. Sandwich boards is one of his. He creates this word for people that walk around with a sign on the front and the back. He also does doormat as a metaphor for people who are walk ons. He was a doormat meaning he let people walk all over him. But dickens the great creations of dickens or words like names of people. Pickwick enn scrooge is a character as sort of a bad spirit around the time of the holidays. He was a scrooge. My favorite one was pod snapper e. Pod snapper he was his word for selfsatisfied philistines. He would say i dont like modern art but just to say it to show how they were going to exceed to the masses. The other one that intrigued me was john milne. Milton is creating a world of heaven and hell for paradise lost. The words that he creates are things like pandemonium which he creates the dwelling place of the spirits and the demons and the devil. The other phrase he came up with which is wonderful is all hell broke loose which is when he came up with. And satanic is his. In a lot of a lot of ways melt and had a phenomenal ability to do this stuff to come up with language. Love warren is his. Padlock. Infinite sea, earthshaking. Mil was the first one to use space in reference to that which is the heavens. Before that space was sort of the distance between two people are two cities but space to him became the heavens and earth shaking is the kind of thing he saw as part of the way he was creating this world. Again i think the most realistic and interesting writers are the ones who create a language along with the world they are in. And so think of the powerful modern writer is George Orwell who creates a language of totalitarianism but he comes up with doublethink and even the word in 1984 at the phrase the title of this book sort of a metaphor for what would go wrong with the world in terms of totalitarianism. Also in newspeak which is his language the suffix to say, that to use that as a way of introducing language thats his as well from that. The other dystopian. Brave new world is a wonderful title and the concept and a phrase because it comes out of shakespeare and the inside joke is the first thing that the people in this totalitarian state in oxleys totalitarian state again in the words of shakespeare so theres a double hook there. James fenimore cooper, cooper was the first one to really write about the native american. He invents a whole language. Some people say its demeaning but its his attempt to get at their culture. He creates words like war paint, firewater, happy Hunting Ground for the heaven or the life of the american indian. Cooper has a marvelous sense of this and if you reread it. I reread in this book last of the mohicans and he is basically , he is not denigrating i think hes trying to interpret their culture the best he can using the english language. He has a real skill at it. The europeans appreciate cooper. Cooper was probably the most popular writer of his time in europe because people in europe were understanding or at least trying to understand the culture that we were vanquishing at that point. Cooper also had a nice sense of phrase. One of the things i liked was his early writing about john paul jones. He talks about the right stuff. He says jones has the right stuff. He had courage. He was diplomatic and he was this and he was this sunday was that an of course tom was comes around and he goes back to cooper and he says the right stuff. The other one of course congo there are a lot of them but Herman Melville who is creating enough for world at sea. It sort of became for a long time and still to this day something outrageously large and a metaphor for something large and important. He got it from the name of a real albino whale. He just changed it to moby dick. Whats interesting about moby dick is and this is why google maps is wonderful. Within 10 miles of my house there is a moby dick sushi place and on wisconsin avenue there is my favorite the moby dick house of kebabs. [laughter] the other story about melvilles language about moby dick is when they would start this club out of the west coast there is a big group of guys that got together and started this coffee company. They have a name picked out called pequot. A guy named earl schultz came in with a lot of money and he looked at these guys great he said he really dont want to call a coffee shop pequot. They said yeah you are right. The first solo was offputting for coffee so he said you have any other names . Somebody said yeah starbuck was the first mate. He said thats at starbucks. Every time i drive by starbucks i say theres another pequot. So i can go on with this whole business. Melville had the strange words he picked up. People who are isolated from other people were regarded as isolated as. Beecher stowe again creates Uncle Toms Cabin but within the language and of course we know what happened to uncle tom over time. She had this wonderful sense of metaphor metaphor that she uses in the book so when she talks about a person being sold down the river she was talking about someone who was probably somewhere in mississippi and probably a household slave. Somebody who may have cooked or tended to the children or something. But if the owner of this person sold the person to someone down the river at meant they would become field slaves and work out in the horror of the fields. So being sold down the river in that book was literally being sold into a deeper darker form of enslavement. I could go one about the different people. Just for a little bit for a few minutes if we have time i will pick out a couple of my favorites. There are a lot in the book. The name one writer david was the swede clique of coinage where writers writing and they come up with just the right phrase and just the right turn. When you come up with it. One of my favorites is agnostic in that was t. H. Hudson. I tell you he really got sick of people calling him an atheist when in fact he wasnt. He said he had to create an aim that was neither a religious person or a godfearing person or an atheist. He came up with agnostic and the word took off literally overnight. Franklin pierce adams one of my favorite humorist writers came up with an acronym which is a word for names of people whose names reflected who they were. Like olga tom below for as a ballerina and there was a professor of engineering at annapolis. He loved the name d. C. Current. [laughter] then there is Banana Republic which was zero henrys term for a dictatorial place that have only one crop or one mineral and of course he is down there hiding from the police because he was accused of stealing money from a bank of embezzlement. Coed isnt out of place one. That is louisa may alcott. One of her books out of the blue one of her boy said he didnt like acholi diner he didnt like to e with the girls at school. It just pops out of nowhere. The other one which is on the cover that i just love is the first writer. It may have been used a little bit before but the very first writer used the word baseball we will go back to that in a second but there are these wonderful words that come out of the blue. Another one that i really like is dragon lady. Dragon lady was milked to death in the 1946 comic strip. Its wonderful because he said said the line was, he said you are no mongolian princes. You are the dragon lady. Fact toyed its fun to play with. It was norman mailers creation and mailer said it was really for a small falsehood or something that was repeated often that was untrue like nine out of 10 Small Businesses fail during the first year or Something Like that that is repeated millions of times but has never been proven and most invariably untrue. Almost immediately fact that became a victim of its own definition. People now use it to mean small fact. The dictionaries if you look in the dictionary the first meaning is a falsehood and the second meaning is a truth, that a small truth. And its mailer for that one. Theres a history section over here very close but murder monger us was a wonderful one that ogden nash created for Agatha Christie. He used it in a poem to rhyme with library of congress. Whodunit was a guy named donald gordon. He was a critic in 1930 and of course little gray cells for the brain matter for perot. That was Agatha Christie so youve got those. One that is a lot of fun to talk about is ben bradlees term. You are smiling back there. Its an old term that ben bradlee brought it into the 20th century which means backwards. He was in a big battle with a guy named reed irvine. They were coming up with pencils for one another and he used it for irvine. Irvine got the last laugh because he ended up using that to raise a lot of money or at least according to one of the con site read which was useful to him. It can also bring out a word that was once that died in the language but it was brought up again. Gobbledygook was Maury Maverick junior. Maury maverick was a big deal congressman and it was meant to describe the language of washington which sort of sounds like a turkey gobbling. I love catch22 because catchcatch 22 may be among the best ever book titles. It was about to be released as catch 18 but leon put out a book called my the 18 so they had to pull it back and changed the word didnt 22. The world now knows the phrase catch22 which is the catchall of bureaucratic and military life. In other words in order to get out of the service you have to prove your crazy but if youve proved you are crazy it is means you are sane enough to stay in the service. One of my favorites was actually created in 1510 by a named by a guy named otto botto. He had this imaginary utopia where there were many women and limited amounts of gold, a silver and jewelry or jewels. The people actually started and founded california and those were the words he picked up from his novels like utopia with many riches. Another one of my favorites which was returned them which is a word that you had a certain thing like milk and then you have to go back and modify the original with whole milk or you have a camera and now you have to go say it was a film camera. The wretch on them was something we had to rename given the change in technology. When the cake paperback came out for example instead of a book you would say a hardcover book. Mankin is another great creator of language. Mencken created of course bible belt was his end monkey trial for the scopes monkey trial and on the bibulous which meant he drank just about everything and anything. So i get back to shakespeare and claims have been made about shakespeare. Shakespeares total vocabulary was a little over 17,000 words. Milton hadnt come along. He wasnt born until shakespeare was quite old. Milton brought a whole bunch but shakespeare himself people have quit it that he has invented as many as 3000 words. The most current estimates are he invented 1700. I did a lot of work with this. I worked with the Shakespeare Guild of america. I went to several people who were shakespeare experts an