Word-Coinage; Being an Inquiry Into Recent Neologisms, Also a Brief Study of Literary Style, Slang, and Provincialisms (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1902. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IX. Neologisms.--( Continued.) Professor Thomas J. Allen advocates the adoption of such a means of improving our language as will give future generations the benefit of the united efforts of the best living authorities on language, and he would gladly support any movement that might lead toward that end. If the expression be allowed, he favors respectable counterfeiting, in the hope that it may lead to the establishment of a mint. But he is not a counterfeiter. He knows that we need more word-currency, but he does not wish to assume the responsibility of coining. He is averse to "free and unlimited coinage." He believes in a single standard--constituted authority. Edward Payson Jackson made a rather neat word in Filipina, to designate a Filipino woman. Dr. Van Dyke, in Fisherman's Luck, devotes a light and airy chapter to the subject of Taxability. Professor John Duncan Quackenboe, in Hypnotism in Mental and Moral Culture, introduces a fearsome word denoting a parlous thing. It is opsomania, which, alas works its ravages among the young and fair. It gives them "indigestion, mental indolence, chronic gastric catarrh, and, most to be deplored, a fetid breath, which renders the possessor positively odious." "The breath of a healthy girl of twenty," moralizes Professor Quackenbos, "should be pure and sweet as a May breeze," but opsomania "transforms it into a nauseous blast." In his review of the book William S. Walsh comments in these words on this fashionable malady: "It is the commonest of all complaints among the girls of the period. The girls themselves call it a sweet tooth, or, rather, a sweet tooth is that form of the complaint which mostly attacks the girls. In a general way Dr. Quackenbos defines opsomania as a mania for articles of food, ...