Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 25 October 2008

Do Wordsworth on the origins of words

issue 25 October 2008

It is a curious misapprehension of many otherwise intelligent and well-informed people to think that a writer who is the earliest to be quoted in the dictionary as having used a word actually invented it.

The lofty Oxonian Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947), who as the son of Bodley’s librarian should have known better, left in his Notebooks a list of words under the names of the people who ‘invented them’ (if the published transcript may be relied on).

So he attributes insecurity to the invention of Sir Thomas Browne. The OED does indeed quote the old physician as using the word in 1646 but, later in its entry, quotes Jeremy Taylor using insecurities, in 1649. It is possible that, though secluded in Golden Grove in south Wales during the Civil War, Taylor had a chance to read Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and jumped at the word insecurity, noting it down excitedly in his tablets for his next book of devotion.

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