The interesting history of ‘unfriend’
The word ‘unfriend’ is, like the word ‘muggle’, one that has a curious history: ‘unfriend’ had a life before Facebook. Its principal meaning now is to delete somebody as a friend on a social media side, especially Facebook, but it has been used variously as both a noun and verb since at least the thirteenth century. Its origins are somewhat surprising.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The best non-fiction books are often the most accessible, at least if you’re a keen amateur or enthusiast rather than a specialist. From language trivia books to overviews and histories of the English language, there are many informative and engaging books about words and language out there, so where to begin?
A collection of great coinages from famous writers, from ‘blatant’ to ‘nerd’
We put together the following picture a few weeks ago and shared it on our Twitter feed, where it proved popular enough for us to repost it here. It’s designed to be a colourful illustration of how many of the most descriptive and delicious words in the English language owe their existence to famous authors, whether it’s James Joyce or Lewis Carroll, John Milton or Dr Seuss.
15 neologisms and coinages to describe as yet unnamed experiences in the modern world
Here at Interesting Literature Towers we love interesting word facts. On Twitter we recently held a competition to coin a new word for something that doesn’t really have an existing word to describe it. (We’ve tried to get bibliosmia into common currency, but it needs a bit more of a push.) Using the hashtag #CoinANewWord, we encouraged our followers and other Twitterers to suggest new words for familiar experiences and feelings, especially those that are peculiar to the modern-day world. Below are some of our favourites. We’ll start with the winner of the competition, who received a stack of great non-fiction books on language and related subjects by Caroline Taggart (whose latest book, on a related theme, we’ve written about here), provided by the publishers, Michael O’Mara Books.
If you think ‘totes’, ‘fangirl’, and ‘trick out’ are recent idioms, then we’re here to surprise you. In a previous post on Twitter terms and literature we uncovered some of the ancient literary origins of words more commonly associated these days with the world of social networking.