Dickens’s coinages
‘Dickens. Makes a change,’ said my husband, flopping a TLS on to the chair next to his whisky-drinking chair and turning to the free Telegraph television guide. The sarcasm was stingless, as we’re only in the second month of Dickens year, with plenty to enjoy.
I saw Dickens credited the other day with the invention of 265 new words. If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary it becomes clear that he did no such thing. In 258 cases, Dickens is the source of the earliest quotation illustrating the use of a word. This is often mistaken as evidence that an author invented it. Geoffrey Madan makes the error in his Notebooks, calling Byron the inventor of bored because a couplet from Don Juan is quoted in the OED: ‘Society is now one polished horde,/ Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.’
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