Shakespeare edisoned hundreds of words and expressions — there, I’ve tried to coin a word myself. In this instance, I used the name of an inventor as a verb meaning “to invent.” But of course, all I’ve done is show how hard it is to come up with something new in the way of words. It turns out that back in the early 1920s, “to edison” was in common usage, a bit of metaphorical jargon popular with the flapper crowd. (They also used “to houdini” as a verb meaning to show up right on time — the magician’s death-defying tricks often being of the beat-the-clock variety.)
Which means the feat of the glove-maker’s son is all the more astonishing. Shakespeare has been credited with inventing words such as pageantry and posture, useful and useless. His vocabulary is also helpful for describing the moment — the Bard of Avon has been credited with such timely terms as sanctimonious and protester (though this latter had a somewhat different meaning for Shakespeare: That older meaning has been given as “a person who makes a protestation of love.” If only there were more of that sort than the looting variety.
As with most things Shakespearean, there is dispute over whether he actually invented that many words or whether his use just happened to be the first in print.
But there is no disputing that Shakespeare particularly excelled at minting metaphors and phrases: jealousy as a “green-eyed monster,” wish as “father to the thought,” “more in sorrow than in anger,” “more sinned against than sinning,” “laughing stock,” “blinking idiot.”
Another writer to have penned terms and phrases that stuck, though his work may not have been on a Shakespearean scale, was George Orwell. The scholar John Rodden puts it more forcefully, calling Orwell “the great twentieth-century master of enduring catchwords and neologisms.” There are “thought police,” “Big Brother,” and the “memory hole,” just for starters.
I’ve been thinking of Orwell’s catchphrases over the last week or two as they have been dragged out, writhing and wailing, by journalists eager to put them through their paces. I have in mind, in particular, the “memory hole,” used frequently to describe the rough history-scouring of the Black Lives Matter movement. “What are the protesters trying to do but eliminate the past?” many a pundit has asked. They are putting history down the memory hole.
But the function of the memory hole has largely been misremembered. The device does indeed obliterate items and evidence from the past, but there is more to it than that. It also replaces the actual past with a contrived history. This is Winston Smith’s job in 1984. For example, a little while past, “the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grams to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at sometime in April.”
It was only after “correcting” the record — no one dared to admit that what they were doing was a fraud — that all of the old originals were destroyed: “He crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.”
“Minute by minute the past was brought up-to-date,” Orwell wrote. “All history was a palimpsest.”
Our current protesters have yet to graduate from the mere destruction of historical artifacts to the kind of thorough and subtle control of the past that Orwell imagined. But such methods are sure to beckon. The Party slogan puts it with clarity and concision: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
