THE phrase “mobile phone” was coined in 1945, according to an article on the Oxford Dictionaries website. Wonder what they used it to refer to.
Words are being coined and added to the English language every so often. They sprout from evolving technology, inventions, fashion and colloquialisms. There are also many words and phrases, however, that have come into usage purely from the imagination and creativity of famous authors.
One of the latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary is the word “muggle”, from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. Their definition (which you won’t find in the online dictionary yet) says:
“Muggle: invented by JK (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling (b. 1965), British author of children’s fantasy fiction. In the fiction of JK Rowling: a person who possesses no magical powers. Hence in allusive and extended uses: a person who lacks a particular skill or skills, or who is regarded as inferior in some way.”
It is an honour for Rowling that the word has been incorporated so soon, as J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation “hobbit” was not accepted into the dictionary’s pages until 1976, nearly 40 years after The Hobbit was first published, and three years after Tolkien’s death.
The word became popular because of the author’s later work, The Lord of the Rings (1954), in which the hobbit Frodo Baggins saves Middle Earth.
In the Merriam Webster Dictionary, “hobbit” is described as a “member of a fictitious peaceful and genial race of small humanlike creatures that dwell underground”.
Lewis Carroll created a huge impact with his Alice in Wonderland. When someone gives a wide grin, not necessarily full of good humour, you say they’re grinning like a Cheshire Cat. And the elastic hair band worn by girls is called an Alice band after the one that Alice is shown wearing in the illustrations of the book.
Anything that has been around for a long time will exert its influence, and nursery rhymes and fairy tales are the literature that most people grow up learning.
Based on Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, we use “pied piper” to refer to a person who makes attractive but delusive offers – especially used for politicians who talk big and deliver little.
From Hans Christian Andersen we get ugly duckling – a person who appears unpromising at first but turns out to have much prospect.
The Grimm brothers gave us Cinderella, used to either describe someone who goes from rags to riches, or who is being ill-treated as Cinderella was in the story.
A man who marries and murders his wives one after another is a bluebeard (are there really such men?), from the scary story (Barbe Bleue in the original French) by Charles Perrault.
The classics come next in their contribution, after our childhood diet of fairy tales. An odyssey is a long adventurous voyage or a spiritual quest - from Homer’s epic The Odyssey.
A hypocritically humble person is a “uriah heep”, named after the unsavoury character in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. If you’re miserly, you may be nicknamed Scrooge after Ebenezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol. From Oliver Twist, Fagin has entered the dictionary as someone who instructs, especially the young, in criminal activities.
A loan shark is a shylock, from Shakespeare’s famous usurer in The Merchant of Venice. As a verb, to shylock someone is to lend money at outrageous rates of interest.
It is believed that the Oxford English Dictionary is particularly partial to William Shakespeare, and it attributes numerous words to him, even those that were, perhaps, in use before Shakespeare made them popular.
We have to thank him for the popular phrases “a method in (our) madness” (Hamlet), “neither rhyme nor reason” (As You Like It), “a fool’s paradise” (Romeo and Juliet), “mum’s the word” (Henry VI) and many, many more – there are entire books and websites on Shakespeare’s contribution to English.
If you would have liked to know the etymology of all these words and you’re turning up your nose now because you didn’t, you just have a sour grapes attitude, thanks to Aesop!
(c) Hasmita Chander, 2003. This article may not be copied or reproduced in any way without permission from the author.