what is a literary coinage?
please….. now…..
Favorite Answer
Many neologisms have come from popular literature, and tend to appear in different forms. Most commonly, they are simply taken from a word used in the narrative of a book.
A few representative examples are:
“grok” (to achieve complete intuitive understanding), from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein;
“McJob”, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland;
“cyberspace”, from Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Sometimes the title of the book will become the neologism:
Catch-22 (from the title of Joseph Heller’s novel).
Also worthy of note is the case in which the author’s name becomes the neologism, although the term is sometimes based on only one work of that author. This includes such words as “Orwellian” (from George Orwell, referring to his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four) and “Ballardesque” (from J.G. Ballard, author of Crash). Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle was the container of the Bokononism family of nonce words.
Another category is words derived from famous characters in literature, such as “quixotic” (referring to the titular character in Don Quixote de la Mancha by Cervantes), a “scrooge” (from the main character in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol), or a “pollyanna” (from Eleanor H. Porter’s book of the same name).
Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” has been called “the king of neologistic poems” as it incorporated some dozens of invented words. The early modern English prose writings of Sir Thomas Browne are the source of many neologisms as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary.
