Words Dickens loved

I wallow in words.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens invented many words. Unlike Shakespeare, the words coined by Dickens rarely found their way into the language. Some words associated with Dickens, such as humbug, were not actually his inventions. Rampage, footlights, boredom, kibosh and snobbish have also been wrongly attributed to the great Victorian novelist.

One finds this information in What the Dickens?, a wonderful dictionary of Dickensian words written by Bryan Kozlowski and published a couple of years ago.

Dickens loved interesting names and interesting words, as any of his readers can attest. Often he enjoyed turning his characters' names into words, such as, Barnacleism, Pecksniffian, Nellicide, Smallweedy and Pumblechookian. Considering how many common English words have been formed from the names of real or fictional people, it seems surprising that none of these words has caught on.

My vote for the best Dickens creation goes to sassigassity, found in his story "A Christmas Tree." The word, meaning audacity with attitude according to Kozlowski, is fun to say and should be a part of everyone's vocabulary. Unfortunately it isn't. Other Dickens failures include adverbiously, comfoozled and the delightful phrase gas and gaiters, meaning everything is satisfactory.

In his commentary on each word, Kozlowski usually strays into trivia about the author's life and works, making his book almost as much a biography as a dictionary. About the word trumpery (which one would think would be undergoing something of a revival these days), he tells us that Dickens seemed to need a title before he could get serious about writing a novel. Before he could write Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, he flirted with such surnames as Sweezleden, Sweezleback and Chuzzletoe. Not until he came to Chuzzlewit did the novel fall into place.

For those who love Charles Dickens and those who love words, and these may well be mostly the same people, What the Dickens? is a good book to wallow in.