“To coin a phrase”*…
Elliot Thornley nods to Shakespeare as the prodigious coiner of words (and phrases) that he was…
And then reminds us that Jeremy Bentham was no slouch with a neologism himself…
It’s pretty amazing. Shakespeare really shaped the English language!
So did Jeremy Bentham. He’s best-known for inventing utilitarianism and the panopticon [see here], but he also coined the words:
- Minimize
- International
- Percentage
- Pluralism
- Monetary
- Locating
- Marginalize
- Codify
- The prefix ‘self-’
- Maximize
- The prefix ‘post-’
- The prefix ‘infra-’
- Exhaustive
- Insurable
- Collaborator
- Alleviating
- Unaffordable
- Exclusionary
- Inexclusively
- Antagonising
- Deontology
- Disambiguation
- Eudemonic
- Evidentiary
- Characterizable
- Perusable
- Preferability
- Remediation
- Astuteness
- Uncalculating
- Uncoerced
- Unbridgeable
- Subvariety
You can find even more Bentham coinages at my source [lots more].
And as if all that weren’t enough, Bentham kind of invented jogging:
Bentham appears to have been a regular jogger—or, as he put it, ‘circumgyrater’. According to the journalist George Wheatley, who stayed with the eighty-one year-old Bentham in March 1831, before both breakfast and dinner Bentham would take ‘a few turns in the garden, which … he calls circumgyrating’, which Wheatley described as a ‘trotting or taking up a kind of trotting step’.
So not only are you quoting Bentham, you might be mimicking him too…
The second-greatest coiner of English words? “You are quoting Bentham.”
More coinage (and source of the image at the top): “Coined Words Acknowledged.”
* idiom
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As we commend contrivers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that another colossal coiner of phrases appeared: the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies animated short “A Wild Hare”– the first “official” Bugs Bunny cartoon– premiered (though long-time readers will recall that Bugs [or at least, his prototype] made his inaugural screen appearance two years earlier). Directed by Tex Avery, “A Wild Hare” was nominated for an Academy Award.
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