What’s in a name, indeed? If it didn’t matter, Shakespeare would never have invented so many new ords. And neither would John Milton – who beat him as English language’s number one wordmaker, with 620 neologisms to his credit.
Milton – born 400 years ago today at this very hour (6.30am, same as me) – knew that it is in language and its words that we learn to look, by naming what we see; to think, by working out what makes one thought different from another and marking it with a little placemarker; to reason, by marking how one idea or observation leads to or connects with another, and so on.
Milton, with Paradise Lost, changed your world whether you know it or not. He changed your world even if you’re sitting enslaved in some dreary council office right now, no respite visible, drudging unaided in the near presence of some unprincipled, opiniastrous manager whose didactic complacency and impassive rebuff do daily damage to your self-esteem, even if your entire literary life is as the yawning void of anarchy, etc.
Got the picture yet?
Yes. Dreary, acclaim, rebuff, self-esteem, unaided, impassive, enslaved, jubilant, serried, solaced, satanic, saintly, liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, respite, void, terrific, embellishing, unprincipled, presence, adventurer, dimensionless, fragrance, didactic, love-lorn, self-esteem, complacency, anarchy, ethereal, sublime, feverish, flowery: all Milton’s.
John Crace tells us:
Milton’s coinages can be loosely divided into five categories. A new meaning for an existing word – he was the first to use space to mean “outer space”; a new form of an existing word, by making a noun from a verb or a verb from an adjective, such as stunning and literalism; negative forms, such as unprincipled, unaccountable and irresponsible – he was especially fond of these, with 135 entries beginning with un-; new compounds, such as arch-fiend and self-delusion; and completely new words, such as pandemonium and sensuous.”
John Leonard, in the introduction to his Penguin Classics edition of Paradise Lost, was at pains to illustrate the scholarly difficulties or verifying all this, and gives us the very useful and remarkable phrase: “words and senses ‘apparently original in some sense with Milton’,” the inner bit of which comes from an earlier scholar called William Hunter. Hunter, in a seminal essay which I of course know nothing about (sorry), says that over a thousand of these are attributed to Milton; and that the OED, cheeringly, got only 28 wrong.
But even so, Crace sadly concludes:
“Some of his words, such as intervolve (to wind within each other) and opiniastrous (opinionated), never quite made it into regular usage – which feels like our loss rather than his.”
Baroque in Hackney 
And other words, like “frore,” are kept alive, not because Milton coined them, but because he used them. Or so such an opiniastrous chap as I believes.
Of course, now “intervolve” is going into the very next thing I write. After this.
“Intervolve” is just lovely.
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