Ralph Keyes explores the American talent for neologisms – itself a word first used by Thomas Jefferson:
What literate person hasn’t dreamed of staking a claim to verbal posterity by coining a word? Some, such as Gelett Burgess, become virtual mints of coined words. Though little remembered today, the early-20th-century San Francisco humorist and folk lexicographer was a prolific generator of neologisms. In a 1906 article, Burgess repurposed the chemical term bromide to refer to clichés. The cover of his 1907 book Are You a Bromide ? featured an effusive woman named Miss Belinda Blurb, whose surname Burgess suggested we use for book endorsements, ones “abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the ‘sensation of the year.’ ” Blurb caught on and stuck around, partly because it named a new phenomenon heretofore unnamed, partly because it felt good in the mouth. So did another Burgessism: goop. These neology hits were the exception, however. Most of Burgess’s verbal inventions were misses. Like all determined word coiners, Burgess had far more splooches than successes. (Splooch was his word for “a failure.”) Among the humorist’s many creations that died with him were huzzlecoo (“an intimate talk”), igmoil (“a sordid quarrel over money matters”), and wox (“a state of placid, satisfied contentment”).
The Dish 