The way new words and terms enter the English language is a mysterious process.
Some words are hard to trace, because they are so disreputable that they were not immediately recorded. This includes a lot of swearing. If a particular term of abuse is too obscene to be printed, how do we know how long it circulated verbally, or on bathroom stalls and graffiti-scrawled alley walls, before someone recorded it?
Others are obscure for different reasons.
For example, it’s often claimed that Shakespeare invented about 1,700 new words, which is a pretty great run! If you spread that across his 154 sonnets and 39 plays, that equals 8.8 words per publication!
However, it’s also very likely that Shakespeare, because his plays were preserved while much of the other work of that era has been lost, was simply the first person to be recorded using common terms.
So which ones did he actually create? Olympian and addiction? Zany and puking? We may never know.
There are words that enter common English from science, technology, and slang, but novels, short stories, and dramatic scripts seem to generate more than their fair share.
Consider the odd afterlife of the word vril, from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 weird sci-fi novel Vril: The Coming of the Master Race.
It’s a book about a secret underground race of superhumans, who utilize a power called vril.
The concept proved so enduring that certain conspiracy theorists and Nazi occultists thought the novel was true (or hinted at truths) into the 20th century. The word vril also survived into the present day thanks to Bovril, the meat paste flavouring, which was invented shortly after the novel’s publication.
Science fiction writers have offered more than their fair share of words to the world, starting with robot, which comes from the 1920 play RUR by Karel Capek.
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Other words have been a part of the zeitgeist before falling away (remember “grok”?) but some seem pretty solid.
Cyberspace, for example, came from William Gibson’s early short stories. In Neuromancer, he described the visual representation of computer networks as looking like “city lights, receding…” which is a lot more alluring than a bunch of apps on a phone, to be honest.
One of the most unacknowledged writers to have changed English is probably spy novelist John le Carré.
In his works about grimy, morally ambiguous espionage agents and bureaucrats, le Carré brought us the term mole for a sleeper agent, and disgorged a whole host of other terms that were either real, but rare, spy jargon, or which he’d made up from whole cloth.
Tradecraft, honey pot, lamplighters, and a dozen other terms appear in the dense lingo of le Carré’s novels. Some of them remain obscure to the public – but were swiftly adopted by actual spies.
When your words work their magic on people whose job is to keep secrets, you’ve done something special to the language.