Children’s Literature in Education DOI 10.1007/s10583-015-9254-2 ORIGINAL PAPER
Dahl’s Neologisms Dominic Cheetham1
Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract Roald Dahl is famous for his lexical creativity, for his skill in naming his characters, his ability to create names for a variety of imagined creatures and sweets, and for his most mentioned achievement in creating the language used by the BFG. This paper presents an overview of the development and patterning of Dahl’s word creation as found in a manual search for the neologisms in all his children’s books. That data is then used as a tool to examine the question of how child readers can cope with the often large numbers of created, and therefore unknown, words in a story. It is argued that the humour of the created words may act as a cue to readers, identifying these words as not needing deeper understanding. Keywords Roald Dahl Neologism Novel language Lexical creation Humour Understanding
Introduction Dahl’s writing for adults and his writing for children is markedly different in a number of ways (Shavit, 1986, pp. 43–59), but one notable difference is his lexical creation, barely evident in his adult work but extremely common in his work for children (Valle, 2004, p. 191). The use of neologisms in children’s literature is not unusual and is often accepted as an almost natural element (Rose, 1995, pp. 2–3). However, if we consider that reading is a very powerful way for young readers to Dominic Cheetham is a lecturer in Children’s Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo. He has published on a variety of topics in children’s literature including the history of dragons, translation and translation theory, language learning, and history in children’s fiction. & Dominic Cheetham
[email protected] 1
Sophia University, Chiyoda-ku, Kioi-cho 7-1, Tokyo 102-8554, Japan
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acquire new vocabulary (Swanborn and de Glopper, 1999) they must already be dealing with large numbers of new words, or as Adam Rose argues, ‘‘in a very real sense, children are surrounded by ‘nonsense’ words and texts all the time’’ (p. 3). To add to this load by introducing neologisms into a text would seem to be counterproductive and likely to lead to an increase in reading difficulty. However, this does not seem to be the case. Children clearly enjoy Dahl’s word creation (Culley, 1991, p. 68; Maynard and McKnight, 2002, p. 156) just as they have enjoyed earlier creators of lexis such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear or A.A. Milne. This paper has two aims; first, to examine the patterns and development of Dahl’s use of neologism in his stories for children, and second, from that analysis to show how the use of neologisms can escape the cost of increased reading difficulty.
Categories of Word Creation Dahl’s earliest story published for children was The Gremlins (1943), though Dahl himself appears not to have considered it a children’s book (Dahl, in West, 1990, p. 62). The Gremlins has five non-standard lexical inclusions; gremlin, fifinella, widgets, spandules, and wipple scrumpet. These are only five words, but they provide examples of the basic categories of word creation that Dahl used in his stories and throughout his career. The first category is of false neologisms. This is the use of real words which, because they are rare or because of their sound, appear to readers to be original creations. For The Gremlins (TG) the best example of this is the word gremlin itself. Gremlins were part of the oral mythology of the RAF even before Dahl wrote his story (Simpson and Roud, 2000, p. 155), and Dahl explains that ‘‘I didn’t invent the word. It was being knocked about in my squadron and maybe other squadrons, too. But I think I was the first to use it in print’’ (Dahl in West, 1990, p. 62). However, before Dahl popularised the word it was in limited use and relatively unknown amongst the general public. The use of false neologism is more common in Dahl’s work than might be expected, especially in his earlier works and especially for the names of fantastic creatures such as whangdoodle, wampus or prock (James and the Giant Peach, 1961, p. 135) which are borrowed from North American folklore (Haworth and O.G.S., 1905; Raysor, 1959). Words like gremlin and whangdoodle raise important questions about neologism in children’s fiction, most important of which are the questions of whether, and how, children identify words as standard parts of the lexicon or as authorial creations, and if recognised as creations, whether or not, or to what degree, they need to be understood. Other lexical creation can be divided into either original usage or original creation. Original usage is of word-forms which already have a place in the language, but which are given an original syntactic or semantic function within a story. Original creation is the inclusion of word-forms which do not already exist in the language. Examples of original usage include ‘‘widget’’ (TG, p. 23), originally meaning some kind of gadget or mechanical part, but used by Dahl to mean a child gremlin. Another example is ‘‘curlicue’’ used by Dahl not as the name for a
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decorative curl but for a monster, ‘‘the giant curlicue’’ in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (CGGE, 2013/1972, p. 145). To a lesser extent fifinella belongs to the same category. Adults at the time of publication would very likely have recognised it as the name of a famous racehorse borrowed into the new meaning of female gremlins. However, this recognition is much less likely for child readers, and indeed, for readers of any age today, showing that borrowed words can move on a cline (continuum) of how likely they are to be known by readers. Examples of original lexical creation include spandules and wipple scrumpet (TG), or OompaLoompas and snozzberries from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (CCF, 2013/ 1973). In a variation on simple word creation there is also the possibility of original phrasal lexis (Rudd, 2012 p. 56). Effectively, this means taking an established, relatively fixed phrase, and changing its form, as in ‘‘I will be nothing but skin and groans’’ from The BFG (BFG, 2013/1982 p. 42), where groans would normally be bones. The new phrasing is original, but still makes sense, and in this example and others (Rudd, 2012, p. 56), even rhymes with the word it replaces. Other examples are, ‘‘very, very old and crumply’’ (BFG, p. 43) where crumply stands in for a standard descriptor of an aged person such as wrinkly, grey or tired. This category of phrasal creation can involve replacement of set lexical items with unusual but real words, or the replacements may be invented words such as in, ‘‘you’re in a bit of a twizzler aren’t you?’’ in The Minpins (TM, 1991a p. 18), where twizzler stands in for something like fix, bind or tizzy. One slightly ambivalent type of created word is the spoonerism. Spoonerisms do not directly use the word-form of an existing word, but unlike much other created lexis, they are relatively transparent in their meaning. In the case of spoonerisms, the significance for Dahl’s work rests in the lack of use rather than use. Except for one example, ‘‘you’ve got us into quite enough tubbles and trumbles for one day!’’ (CGGE, p. 104) where the spoonerism is used to display Grandpa George’s extreme agitation, Dahl only uses spoonerisms in The BFG where they are part, and evidence of, the BFG’s own distinct idiolect. The BFG contains eighteen different spoonerisms including those based on morphological switching rather than the traditional switch of phonological elements (Rudd, 2012, pp. 56–57). In Matilda (2013/1988) Miss Honey imagines changing the name of the Wormwood house from ‘‘cosy nook’’ to ‘‘nosey cook’’ (p. 86) but because this is an explanation rather than a substitution, I have not included it in the count of Dahl’s spoonerisms. Within these three basic divisions, sub-divisions can be made. It is conventional in the study of neologisms to concentrate on the mechanics of word formation looking at how the words are created, and to categorise accordingly (see for example Sˇtekauer, 2002). This form of analysis has already been carried out in Rudd’s breakdown of Dahl’s methods of word creation (2012, pp. 56–59), and in a comparative study of Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra and Dahl’s The BFG (Munat, 2007). Although Judith Munat found differences in the formal construction of created lexis for The Simulacra and for The BFG, she ultimately argues that whereas for science fiction the controlling factor for the introduction of novel words is the creation and expansion of meaning and the introduction of new concepts, for The BFG the controlling factor is sound:
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even though compounding and derivational processes account for many of the words on the list, the resulting word forms are distinctly different from those identified in SF… The primary characteristic of these formations is that many (most?) of them seem to be phonologically motivated (p. 175) For this study then, I shall concentrate on sub-categories of usage rather than of word formation, as this allows us to focus on the particular narrative uses to which Dahl puts his own creation of lexis, though this does at times lead back to discussion of word formation techniques, especially in terms of transparency or opacity of meaning.
Neologisms: Distribution and Usage Dahl uses a large number of created words in his stories but the distribution is not even. Some stories use very few or no neologisms at all; Danny the Champion of the World (1975) has none, The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1991b) has only the village name of the title. Others use neologisms only for the names of characters, as with the three names for the farmers in Fantastic Mr Fox (FMF, 1970), or Mr Hoppy in Esio Trot (1991). Matilda carries only six created words, five of which are names like Oliie Bogwhistle (p. 100) created for comic effect (plus one created product ‘‘Skin Scorcher’’ itching powder, p. 101). Other stories also have a very low number of created words; The Magic Finger (1966) has only two created words, both foods (slugburgers and wormburgers, p. 32), and The Enormous Crocodile (TEC, 1978) has only nine, five of which are names of characters. The Gremlins, as mentioned above, has only five words, four of which are the names of creatures (plus ‘‘wipple scrumpet’’). Eight of Dahl’s seventeen books for children therefore, have between them a total of just twenty-seven created words, nineteen of which are names of characters or creatures. This is not a particularly notable level of production, particularly as children’s books in general have a relatively high number of invented names. The created words in these texts are also unlikely to create any extra cognitive load on child readers as even conventional proper names are opaque in meaning, and as the more meaningful created words (like ‘‘slugburger’’) are transparent blends of simple lexis. This low incidence of created lexis and a tendency towards transparent blends is particularly evident in those of Dahl’s texts which are most based in reality. This also is an unexceptional finding as created lexis for any age is most common in science fiction, fantasy, and in nonsense poetry. It may be argued that Matilda and The Magic Finger are to some extent fantasy novels. In Matilda, despite Matilda’s special powers, the story has no fantastical creatures, no ritual magic such as mixing potions, and no great emphasis on magic as an extended plot element. The Magic Finger also lacks ritual magic but the transformation of the Gregg family into birds does give a strong fantastical element. However, in the case of The Magic Finger the lack of neologisms is likely to be a result of Dahl writing to fit the publisher’s vocabulary restrictions to that which a ‘‘beginning reader could readily understand’’ (West, 1992, p. 95).
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These eight texts have a total of only twenty-seven created words, which sets them dramatically apart from the remaining nine, which have between them over 700 created words. Naturally, the greatest number of created words is to be found in The BFG as the BFG and the other giants speak in a highly distinctive variety of English with a large number of non-English words. There is a good deal of misunderstanding about the number of created words in The BFG as amongst Dahl’s papers there was a typed check-list, made by Dahl, with ‘‘283 made-up words’’ added in blue biro at the bottom of the first page (RD2/19/1, 1981a, p. 2). This number, although it is more commonly miswritten as ‘‘238’’ rather than ‘‘283’’, has been reproduced in a number of homepages, blogs and even downloadable PDFs from Puffin Books. However, even if the mistake in transcription had not made its way into general knowledge, 283 would still be an inaccurate count. Dahl’s list does not have a total of 283 words but 301, not including double entries or words crossed out. But even this number is inaccurate. The list was part of a work in progress, meaning that not all the words on the list are used in the published text, and many more words not on the list are used in the published text. Identification and counting of neologisms must always be somewhat idiosyncratic, but the total number of words I could find in The BFG which are not recognised by the Microsoft Word spell checking software and which are not listed in online dictionaries, number 339 (including names of giants). In addition to these there are also 49 existing English words used with original meanings or usages, 6 false neologisms, 56 phrasal creations, 18 spoonerisms and 4 words with punned re-spellings. There are also two possible misprints, words published as normal English, but written differently in the manuscript versions, ‘‘swallowed up’’ (p. 27) which was ‘‘swalloped up’’ in manuscript RD/2/19/3 (1981c, p. 22) and ‘‘frosty night’’ (p. 29) which was ‘‘frotsy night’’ in manuscript RD/2/19/2 (1981b, p. 35). The total number of lexical items created, not including the possible misprints, comes to 473, approximately double the figure most commonly quoted on internet pages. The BFG then, has the greatest number of neologisms, but other texts also add to the overall total. CGGE with a total of 74 new words has the next greatest number. The others, in order of publication, are, James and the Giant Peach (JGP) 21, CCF 29, The Twits (1980) 15, George’s Marvellous Medicine (GMM, 1981) 21, The Witches (TW, 1983) 22, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985) 25, and TM 24. The Witches, with The Grand High Witch’s distinctive speech, might be expected to have a higher number of original words, but unlike in The BFG where Dahl has created an extensively used and distinctive idiolect, in The Witches he has only created a strong accent indicated by non-standard spelling and some non-standard syntax, and these have not been included in the count of neologisms. The BFG has by far the greatest number of neologisms of any Dahl text but it still has much in common with the other lexically creative texts. As mentioned above, more realistic texts have fewer neologisms. Texts with more fantastical content have more. This tendency, and its narrative functions, are most clearly found in examining the changes made to the 1973 edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Prior to 1973, the Oompa-Loompas were ‘‘a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies’’ (Dahl, 1964, p. 73) and lived in ‘‘the deepest darkest part of the African jungle’’ (p. 73). Neither the Oompa-Loompas nor the place they came from were
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fantastical, and in this section of text the only created lexis is their name. ‘‘OompaLoompa’’ was only added as a penned amendment to the final manuscript just prior to publication. Previously the secret workers were ‘‘Whipple-Scrumpets’’ (RD/2/7/ 6, 1963, p. 69), a word inherited from The Gremlins. This change seems to have come about because of a letter to Roald Dahl from his agent, Gina Pollinger, who wrote suggesting that he keep Whipple-Scrumpet as a name for one of Willy Wonka’s chocolates and that since ‘‘children reading your book will have acquired enough knowledge of things and sounds African’’ a more ‘‘appropriate’’ name might be better (Pollinger, 1963, p. 3). Dahl seems to have taken heed of this suggestion because on the same manuscript as the Whipple-Scrumpets are changed to OompaLoompas, ‘‘Wonka’s Whipped Cream Fudgemallow Delight’’ is changed to the published ‘‘Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight’’ (RD/2/7/6, p. 31). Some critics have negatively interpreted the ‘African sound’ of ‘‘OompaLoompa’’ as insensitive racial stereotyping (Bosmajian, 1985, p. 46; Mane, 1993, p. 117), but Dahl, with his experience of life in Africa and of the Swahili language in particular, may simply have created a name inspired by that experience, just as he used his experience and ear for language to create original English sounding words. Whatever the linguistic origins of ‘‘Oompa-Loompa’’, from 1973 the text was revised and the Oompa-Loompas were reimagined as fantastical creatures from a fantastical place. The fantasy is expressed by the addition of four new words; ‘‘Loompaland’’ (p. 83), of which Mrs Salt, a teacher of geography, claims ‘‘there’s no such place’’ (p. 83), and the three terrible creatures which live in Loompaland, the ‘‘whangdoodles’’, ‘‘hornswogglers’’ and ‘‘snozzwangers’’ (p. 83). Of these words ‘‘whangdoodles’’ is not a true neologism, being a North American word of varying meaning, reported as used in Indiana in the sense ‘‘are you going to the whang-doodle tonight?’’ (Haworth and O.G.S., 1905, p. 116) as an ‘indefinite name’ used in the Central Western region of the USA (Pound, 1931, p. 259) and as the name for a school baseball club in Hawai’i recorded in 1872 (Ardolino, 2002, p. 31). ‘‘Whangdoodle’’ may not be a true neologism but the sound of the word and its regionally limited use make it seem original. The introduction of the fantasy element through created lexis was a very powerful device in reducing any perceived prejudice or exploitation of the Oompa-Loompas, certainly more effective than keeping them human of whatever colour or ethnic origin.
Names Fantastical names are one of Dahl’s preferred techniques for creating an atmosphere of unreality, but it is not simply the introduction of invented names which creates that atmosphere. Matilda, for example, has five original personal names. However, these names do not create an atmosphere of fantasy, but rather work to create humour and to distance outrageous or violent actions, thus reducing any shock or discomfort. There is a great difference between the names for the creatures of Loompaland and names such as ‘‘Crunchem Hall Primary School’’, ‘‘Miss Trunchbull’’ or ‘‘Bruce Bogtrotter’’. The names from Matilda have more in common with the naming techniques of Charles Dickens (think of Thomas
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Gradgrind, Josiah Bounderby, or Mrs Sparsit from Hard Times) than with the genre of fantasy. The difference lies in the word construction. The names in Matilda (and Hard Times) are mostly blends of identifiable English root words or parts of words. ‘‘Crunchem’’ appears to be a contracted and compounded form of crunch them, and ‘‘Trunchbull’’ could be a blend of Trunch(eon) and bull. The names have a strong link to existing language and have clear associations of meaning and atmosphere. Words such as these, even though they are original, present no problems to the child reader as the associations of the names can be retrieved through an understanding of fairly common existing English vocabulary. In this sense these words are quite similar to many of the neologisms found in science fiction with Munat giving the semantically transparent examples of ‘‘holoscreen’’, ‘‘hyperspace’’ and ‘‘microfood’’ (p. 174). ‘‘Snozzwangers’’ on the other hand has no clear connections of meaning, has no clear roots, has a notable humorous element, but also sounds like a perfectly possible word for the English language, what in psychology would be called a nonword with a high degree of English wordlikeness (e.g. Masoura and Gathercole, 1999). The created words of the less fantastical texts then, are predominantly the names of characters, which separates the different kinds of text in terms of the distribution of created lexis. However, the techniques of name formation are also different between more and less fantastical texts, or parts of text, with the type of word formation being strongly aligned with the atmosphere and content of the text. An unusual exception to this pattern can be found in James and the Giant Peach where Dahl creates the transparent name ‘‘Cloud-Men’’ (p. 103) for fantastical cloud dwelling beings, indicating that at this early stage in his writing he had not yet fully moved into the later pattern of matching opacity with fantasy.
Recipes Another area where fantasy and word creation are linked is in the ingredients of recipes. Recipes are found for magical crystals (JGP, p. 12), for Wonka-Vite (CGGE, p. 119), for aging medicine (CGGE, pp. 144–145), for the marvellous medicine (GMM, pp. 15–30), and for Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker (TW, p. 89). The magic potion in The Witches, created by The Grand High Witch and designed to do the impossible, shrink children into mice, can be taken as an example of a fantastical recipe. There are normal, mundane objects used as ingredients to the potion such as a telescope and an alarm clock; then there are more traditional witchy ingredients like the tails of forty-five brown mice and frog juice, but there are also the created ingredients of ‘‘a grrruntle’s egg… the claw of a crrrabcrrruncher, the beak of a blabbersnitch, the snout of a grrrobblesqvirt and the tongue of a catsprrringer’’ (p. 89). These are novel words but Dahl actively reduces their strangeness and domesticates them by having the English witches restate the ingredients as ‘‘gruntle’’, ‘‘crabcruncher’’, ‘‘grobblesquirt’’ and ‘‘catspringer’’ (p. 89), removing the accent of the Grand High Witch and giving the words a considerably higher English wordlikeness.
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These created ingredients follow the same word creation pattern as the fantastical creatures in CCF. Like hornswogglers and snozzwangers, crabcruncher, blabbersnitch, grobblesquirt and catspringer have the appearance of being blends. Sometimes, as with catspringer or crabcruncher, both elements are clear, giving the initial impression that the word meaning might be more transparent. A catspringer probably springs, possibly as part of its hunting behaviour, and it may spring at cats, or like a cat, but ultimately, as with Carroll’s bandersnatch, readers are left with associations and imagination rather than with any clear, retrievable meaning. A grobblesquirt is even more resistant to analysis in that grobble is an invented word-part with only phonological associations to create meaning or atmosphere. The formation gruntle is different as it uses an existing word root grunt and a common word ending to give it the sound of a kind of creature, but the end result is the same. The words are humorous, the elements to the words give us atmosphere and partial image, but they are nonetheless opaque and it is left to Quentin Blake to realize the creatures. But Blake too, restricts our knowledge by only illustrating the parts for the recipe so that we still have no real idea what any of these creatures looks like. These names of fantastical creatures should, on the face of things, create difficulties for child readers. The fact that they apparently do not, but on the contrary, add humour, is a problem to which we shall return later in the analysis. The ingredients in George’s Marvellous Medicine are very different. The created words for these ingredients are things such as ‘‘Brillident for Cleaning False Teeth’’ (p. 21), ‘‘Nevermore Ponking Deodorant Spray’’ (p. 21), or medicines for ‘‘Chickens with Foul Pest’’, or for ‘‘Sheeprot’’ (p. 27). These words are transparent in their meaning with clearly identifiable blends (like ‘‘brilli’’ from brilliant and dent from denture to form ‘brillident’), simple word combinations (like ‘‘sheeprot’’), or even puns with homonyms (foul and fowl). They are humorous, but the humour works differently from words like ‘‘blabbersnitch’’. The words in George’s Marvellous Medicine are humorous because of blends of meanings, spelling, or puns, rather than mainly for sound, as is the case with the more fantastical words in other texts, though they can still have humorous sound in addition to the other humorous elements, as with the alliteration in ‘‘Dishworth’s Famous Dandruff Cure’’ (p. 21). The two recipes in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, are both recited by Mr Willy Wonka and both have quite magical results. Wonka-Vite (pp. 119–120) makes people younger, and the later recipe makes people older (pp. 144–145). In line with the fantastical origin of the recipes (Mr Wonka), and the scientifically improbable results (abrupt changes in physical age), these recipes have significant numbers of words, like ‘‘six ounces of sprunge from a young slimescraper’’ or ‘‘the snout of a proghopper’’ (CGGE, p. 119, emphasis added), which are semantically opaque, have strong English wordlikeness, and stimulate phonologically driven humour. The recipe in James and the Giant Peach, however, does not fit the pattern of more, and more opaque, neologisms for more fantastical situations. The recipe is recited by a mysterious little old man who has a bag of ‘‘tiny green things that looked like stone or crystals’’ (p. 11) but which move, ‘‘glow and sparkle in the most wonderful way’’ (p. 12) and which have ‘‘more power and magic… than in the rest of the world put together’’ (p. 12). The little green things have a magical origin, are magic, and will do magic, but when the mysterious old man recites the recipe the
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ingredients (crocodile tongues, a witch’s skull, a lizard’s eyeballs, a monkey’s fingers, a pig’s gizzard, a parrot’s beak, porcupine juice, sugar) and concludes the recipe with ‘‘let the moon do the rest’’ (p. 12) they are, while being conventionally witchy, entirely made up of real things and described by existing vocabulary. The difference from later stories is startling, but since this is Dahl’s first full-length children’s book we must simply argue that at this point in his writing career he had not yet understood all the different effects which invented words can create, or was not yet confident enough to use a predominance of invented ingredients for an undoubtedly magical recipe. This argument is supported by the fact that much of the novel language throughout this story is borrowed or traditional rather than original. When James and his friends arrive in New York, the police and firemen wonder what they are seeing. Of the twelve guesses they make, four are creatures already extant in North American folk lore (wampus, prock, whangdoodle, and oinck), five are mythical European creatures (dragon, gorgon, sea-serpent, manticore, and cockatrice), and only three are created by Dahl (snozzwanger, scorpula, and Vermicious Knid). In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator Dahl still uses a mix of types of names for creatures. For the recipe for Wonka-Vite he uses four traditional European creatures (manticore, cockatrice, unicorn, and hippocampus), three North American (whangdoodle, whiffle-bird, tree-squeak) but also six created creatures (slimescraper, wilbatros, quadropus, proghopper, snozzwanger, wild grout). For the aging potion he uses obscure though existing words (grimalkin, cattaloo, whistlepig, bobolink, curlicue, and stinging slug), only using three invented creatures (the skrock, the polly-frog, and the venomous squerkle). Although in this story Dahl is still using existing creatures, his selection has moved towards names which are uncommon, probably unfamiliar to child readers, and which often appear to be original Dahl vocabulary. There is a noticeable trend away from the use of better known mythical creatures to lesser known creatures, and to a greater proportion of words created by Dahl rather than borrowed or reinvented. Dahl continues to use the whangdoodle throughout his career (CCF, CGGE, TM, and ‘‘wangdoodle’’ as a sweet in GPM, p. 64), but apart from that, quickly ceases to use other traditional creatures, be they North American or European. In terms of the narrative uses of neologism, at the end of The Witches the boy and his grandmother decide to recreate the Witches’ magic potion, using the same fantastical ingredients (‘‘who is going to climb up the tall trees to get the gruntles’ eggs?’’ p. 197). Because opaque neologisms are not normally used by nonfantastical characters this allows the implication that these two seemingly normal human beings also have a touch of magic or fantasy about them.
Food and Drink One last area of lexical creation is that of names for foods, drinks, and most especially sweets. Despite Dahl’s reputation as a creator of amazing sweets they appear in only two stories. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has six words for sweets, all of them created by Dahl. These names come in two separate groups; blends with varying degrees of transparency (‘‘Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious’’ p. 32, ‘‘Fudgemallow
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Delight’’ p. 32, and ‘‘swudge’’ p. 80), and largely transparent compounds which tend to be punning on existing vocabulary (‘‘has beans’’ p. 102, ‘‘cokernut-ice skating rinks’’ p. 140, ‘‘stickjaw for talkative parents’’ p. 141). The overall effect of this combination is of exotic original sweets and amusing slapstick. In The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me there are twenty created names for sweets all of which, except for a reappearance of the compound ‘‘stickjaw for talkative parents’’ (p. 65), are blends, but are largely opaque, including such words as ‘‘tummyticklers’’ (p. 63), ‘‘nishnobblers’’ (p. 65), and ‘‘glumptious globgobblers’’ (p. 69) which despite being made up sometimes of existing words, or sounds which have strong associations with existing words, still leave the reader with little real idea of what these sweets are like. Sweets are the most numerous of Dahl’s created edibles, but they are restricted to these two texts. Names for other kinds of food and drink appear in limited numbers of both transparent and opaque constructions, and are more evenly spread throughout the corpus; ‘‘mudburgers’’ and ‘‘slobbages’’ (JGP, p. 66), ‘‘snozzberries’’ and ‘‘buttergin’’ (CCF, p. 122, 127), ‘‘slugburgers’’ and ‘‘wormburgers’’ (The Magic Finger, p. 32), ‘‘Wonka-Vite’’ and ‘‘Wonka’s Squdgemallow Baby Food’’ (CGGE, p. 111, 138). The BFG has seven created food and drink names and The Minpins five. For The BFG, considering the overall number of neologisms in the text and the amount of story time spent in Giant Country, this is rather a small number, but despite this the mix of opaque (e.g. ‘‘frobscottle,’’ p. 56) and transparent (e.g. ‘‘vegitibbles,’’ p. 51) words is consistent with other texts. The Minpins, on the other hand, is a much shorter story and all the created words are semi-opaque. All the words are names of berries (‘‘winkleberries’’, ‘‘puckleberries’’, ‘‘muckleberries’’, ‘‘twinkleberries’’ and ‘‘snozzberries,’’ p. 38) but there is no way of knowing what these berries might look or taste like. The berry words of The Minpins have much in common with the sweet and chocolate words of The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me in that they are tightly clustered in the text and create an atmosphere of plenty whilst accentuating the fantastical element of that part of the story. The correlation between these two texts, and especially the contrast with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where created words for sweets, foods and drinks are surprisingly few, allows us to re-appraise the different usages. At first glance it might seem that Dahl is following his established pattern of using more neologisms and more opaque forms in his latter works than in the earlier. However, the narrative effects here are different. For Charlie the created words come at the end of lists or as the second parts of contrasting pairs. ‘‘Has beans’’ is the completion of a list of beans, ‘‘all the beans, cacao beans, coffee beans, jelly beans and has beans’’ (p. 102), whereas ‘‘buttergin’’ is in contrast with ‘‘butterscotch’’ (p. 127). This exploration of incongruity and contrast through neologistic punning is a consistent feature of Willy Wonka’s way of talking and adds humour alongside a touch of discord, leaving us with the question of whether Willy Wonka actually knows of things which we do not, or whether he is simply slightly mad. Different characters throughout the book adopt both these points of view. Ultimately the difference in the use of created food, drink and sweet words in Dahl’s work seems to be less a feature of his development as an author and more a feature of narrative or character development, though the overall pattern of more opaque neologisms for more fantastical texts, parts of texts, or characters, is maintained.
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Other than Names of Characters, Creatures, Food, Drink, and Products So far we have discussed Roald Dahl’s use of neologisms for names of characters, creatures, food, drink, sweets and invented products as parts of recipes. Character names account for most of the neologisms in the less fantastical books, but if we combine all the categories of naming and examine them in relation to other created words we find an interesting pattern. In the first of Dahl’s stories, even those with fantastical content, apart from categories of naming there are very few invented words. Dahl’s first five children’s stories (TG, JGP, CCF, MF, FMF), out of a total of 46 created or borrowed words, have only four such words between them; ‘‘Wipple Scrumpet’’ (TG, p. 47), ‘‘gnormous’’, ‘‘gnorrible’’ (JGP, p. 48), and ‘‘whizbanger’’ (CCF, p. 39), and no such words occur in The Magic Finger or Fantastic Mr Fox. Of the early stories, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has the greatest number of neologisms, with a total of twenty-nine words (four of which were added in the 1973 revision), setting it apart from the others and giving it a notably different atmosphere. However, Charlie is consistent with other early stories in that almost all the created words are for naming, and with the exception of the 1973 additions, are mostly semantically transparent and derived from the existing lexicon. The next story however, is very different. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is not one of Dahl’s most popular works (Hall and Coles, 1999, p. 19, 25), nor was it one of his own favourites (Dahl, in West, 1990, p. 64), but in terms of lexical creation it is a very important work indeed. In this story Dahl seems to experiment with a variety of styles of word creation. He starts to include more verbs, adjectives and adverbs, uses exclamatory phrases (‘‘great whistling whangdoodles’’ p. 174), includes created words in the language of non-fantastical characters, tries his hand at pure nonsense poetry (p. 54), gives us a limerick about the Vermicious Knids (pp. 66–67) and allows himself an invented word used for a rhyme (‘‘squishous’’ to rhyme with an older invented word ‘‘vermicious’’). He has his first recipes with imaginary creatures in the ingredients, includes the only spoonerism (‘‘tubbles and trumbles’’, p. 104) anywhere in his children’s stories except for The BFG, and uses more obscure borrowed words, used to resemble true neologisms, than anywhere else in the corpus. He also experiments with mixing nonsense and oddly spelled meaningful content in a sequence of rhyming couplets: ‘‘Kirasuku Malibuku/ Weebee Wize Un Yubee Kuku!’’ (p. 44). For the purposes of this study I have not included the nonsense words of this sequence in the count of neologisms because they are not used within the system of grammar or as elements of discourse relations, but they are still a significant example of Dahl’s linguistic experimentation within this story. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator marks a milestone in Dahl’s use of novel lexis with an almost equal balance between the numbers of words used for the naming categories, and words with other uses (38:35). The experimentation in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator seems to have heralded a change in the way Dahl then approached the creation of lexis. The next story, Danny the Champion of the World uses no neologisms at all, not even in names of characters. However, Danny is a story powerfully rooted in the real world and also a story based on an
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older and adult short story, all of which are factors indicative of less use of neologism. However, if we put Danny aside, the next story, The Enormous Crocodile, despite being a very short work, has a total of nine original words, five of which are fairly transparent character names, but two of which are relatively opaque adjectives, ‘‘grumptious’’ (p. 4) and ‘‘mushious’’ (p. 8) with identifiable roots but obscure meanings, one an opaque verb ‘‘squizzled’’ (p. 5), and the last an unconventional use of the word ‘‘hoggish’’ in ‘‘oh you horrid hoggish croc’’ (p. 7), probably meaning something like nasty or disgusting, but not meaning like a hog. This may seem a small number of words, but it is indicative of a change in Dahl’s use of neologisms other than for the naming categories which continues in The Twits (10 of 15 words), George’s Marvellous Medicine (8 of 21), The BFG (439 of 473), The Witches (17 of 22), then a reduction in numbers in The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (3 of 25), an abrupt cessation in Matilda (0 of 6), Esio Trot (0 of 1) and The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (0 of 1), but with a final resurgence in The Minpins (11 of 24). Following Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator then, Dahl expanded not only the quantity of neologisms in his work, but also the variety and textual distribution moving out of the clustered usage of the earlier texts. He is more willing to use neologisms to add humour and atmosphere and perhaps less concerned about the possible comprehension problems deriving from the use of created language. The parallel increase in the proportion of more semantically opaque neologisms and the reduced use of borrowed lexis and conventional mythical creatures adds to the image of an author confident in both his ability to create words which will add to the power of a story, and in the ability of his readers to not only cope with larger numbers of invented words but also to enjoy them. This evolving use of neologisms peaked with The BFG, but the quantities of invented lexis in The Witches, The Giraffe the Pelly and Me and in The Minpins are evidence that Dahl did not lose confidence in his and his readers’ ability with such words, but instead, with texts like Matilda, Esio Trot and The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, he was simply making other narrative choices rather than abandoning the varied use of neologisms. The development of Dahl’s use of neologisms also coincides with enormous changes in public expectations for children’s literature, changes which Hunt names ‘‘the Dahl effect’’ (2012, p. 186) and describes as ‘‘a seismic shift in fantasy and children’s books’’ (p. 187) arguing the changes to be in no small part a result of Dahl’s great influence and popularity. Dahl’s writing not only evolved in itself, but also helped stimulate an evolution of children’s literature, possibly destabilising adult expectations of children’s reading ability and creating a situation where greater use of opaque neologism and non-standard language became considerably more acceptable than was the case when Dahl wrote his first books for children.
Understanding The evolution of Dahl’s use of neologism means that, peaking with The BFG, the numbers, variety, distribution and opacity of created language all increase. Stated bluntly, this means that the density and inaccessibility of new language, whether created or not, should also increase. For an unknown word to be understood in
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context it is necessary for that context to be comprehensible. Adding greater numbers of neologisms to the mix should, by virtue of reducing the comprehensibility of the context, also reduce the comprehensibility of any unknown language in a text. Adding neologisms then, should have the double effect of adding unknown material and of adding to the difficulty of normally occurring unknown material. However, this simple logic of quantity does not hold up against children’s reading behaviour and self-reflection on their reading. In Hall and Coles’ extensive survey of British children’s reading (1999), The BFG, despite containing almost five hundred novel lexical items (not including the many repetitions of these words), tops the lists of both ‘‘most frequently mentioned individual titles’’ (p. 24), and of ‘‘most frequently mentioned titles and series’’ (p. 18), closely followed by Matilda, The Witches, The Twits and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. On a much smaller scale, examination of book reviews on The Spaghetti Book Club, a homepage dedicated to reviews of children’s books by children, shows that The BFG has attracted the highest number of reviews of any of Dahl’s books, and that while many children make favourable comments about the humour of the invented language none mentions any related difficulty in reading, some even praising the story as being easy to read. Many of the invented words which Dahl uses are individually semantically opaque. However, Dahl uses a number of techniques to avoid comprehension problems. Notably in earlier texts, but all through his work, Dahl sometimes uses the simple expedient of explaining new words within the story text. Gremlins, for example, are explained in detail in the text both in terms of their physical appearance and their behaviour. In The BFG ‘‘frobscottle’’, an individually opaque word, is explained as a drink, as pale green in colour, as tasting good, and as having downward flowing bubbles. Significant words necessary to the story are often explained through the conversations of the characters or, less commonly, through the explanation of the narrator. Because these words are explained in the text there is naturally a good deal of repetition of the targeted words. For example, on the page of The BFG where ‘‘frobscottle’’ is first introduced (p. 56), the word appears no less that six times, with five of those uses adding description and background to the word. The combination of explanation and repetition is sufficient that many readers will have learned the sound and meaning of the word by the time they have finished the page. Repetition may not only occur within a single text and we find that some of Dahl’s favourite words, like ‘‘whangdoodle’’ or ‘‘snozzberry’’, are repeated in a number of texts. We learn the word ‘‘whangdoodle’’, we learn a number of the whangdoodle’s qualities (‘‘a whangdoodle would eat ten Oompa-Loompas for breakfast and come galloping back for a second helping’’ CCF, p. 83, ‘‘the hide (and the seek) of a spotted whangdoodle’’ CGGE, p. 119, ‘‘‘what’s worse than tigers and lions, Mummy?’/‘Whangdoodles are worse,’ his mother said’’ TM, p. 7), although we never really learn exactly what a whangdoodle is. Many words are made accessible through pairing with known words, as in ‘‘never is it nasty! Frobscottle is sweet and jumbly!’’ (BFG, p. 56). We do not know what ‘‘jumbly’’ means, but it is paired with ‘‘sweet’’ as one of two qualities which are not nasty, and whatever jumbly means it clearly says something good about the drink.
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Readers also gain understanding of new words from their grammatical positioning within a phrase or from standard prefixes or suffixes, as with ‘‘who was you jabbeling to in here just now?… I is jabbeling to myself’’ (BFG, p. 47). Context also contributes to understanding, so that a word (like ‘‘jabbeling’’), which in isolation might not have any clear cognates, can be more easily associated with existing vocabulary (such as jabbering rather than juddering or jabbing). Dahl very often slots a new word into an existing set phrase as in ‘‘you poor little scrumplet’’ (BFG, p. 30), ‘‘the rotten old rotrasper’’ (BFG, p. 31) or ‘‘the filthy old fizzwiggler’’ (BFG, p. 31), so that the inserted word takes on aspects of whatever it replaces within a retrievable meaning for a set phrase (see also Rudd, 2012, p. 56). There are many ways in which a new word can be made more accessible to a reader and if used carefully these can reduce the cognitive effort in resolving the meaning, or at least as much meaning as necessary for a particular example of use. However, unknown real words are learned in much the same way, by a gradual accretion of meaning through repeated experience in a number of texts or contexts, by pairing with other words, and through the information provided by the system of grammar, even through deliberate introduction and explanation by an author, as when Dahl writes of the newt ‘‘it is, in fact, an amphibian, which can live in or out of water’’ (Matilda, p. 131). Dahl goes to great lengths to make the meaning clear for a few of the most important of his created words (like frobscottle), and by doing so reduces the cognitive load on the reader, but even when the load is reduced, there is still a greater load than for known lexis, and there are still many other created words which are not so fully supported and which can only be understood in a very superficial way. These largely unsupported words are in direct contrast to Munat’s findings on the created words in science fiction, which through the regularity of their construction are often semantically transparent and easily deciphered. Munat’s findings support Marc Angenot’s earlier comparison of the language of science fiction with the created language of Lewis Carroll. For Carroll, it is not a matter of describing the Snark as an ‘‘extralinguistic being,’’ but of attributing to it a set of predicates intended to produce a stable paradigm. Of course, Carroll is amusing himself at our expense: he launches into a maelstrom of associations which, although they are not totally incompatible, lead nowhere. The SF writer does not lead the reader to a semantic dead end as Carroll does: he leads the reader to believe in the possibility of reconstituting consistent paradigms – whose semantic structures are supposedly homologous to those in the fictive textual ‘‘world.’’ (Angenot, 1979, p. 13) We would expect invented words with partial contextual explanation to create similar cognitive demands as would any unfamiliar vocabulary, and for the largely unsupported invented words to result in greater cognitive demands even than unknown real words. Fiona Maine and Alison Waller, for example, find the technical and largely opaque language of sailing creates problems for both child and adult readers of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (2011, pp. 264–246). However, as mentioned above, Dahl’s use of neologism does not seem to create any difficulty for his readers. We therefore need to assume that children somehow
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become aware that they do not need to fully understand the unknown word they are experiencing. It was mentioned above that one of the common features of Dahl’s created language is that it is generally recognisable as sounding English with a high degree of wordlikeness. Connected with this is Munat’s argument that the formation of the words seems to be ‘‘phonologically motivated’’ (p. 175), meaning that the sounds of the words are sometimes more important than retrievable meanings. This is consistent with Rudd’s discussion of Dahl’s phonological creativity where he states that ‘‘[i]t is probably the sound of Dahl’s language that is most memorable, making him a classroom favourite’’ (2012, p. 57). Munat argues that the created wordsounds are intrinsically humorous, claiming that ‘‘the majority of Dahl’s lexical creations are ear-catching for a child or ‘phonologically funny’’’ (p. 177) and that, ‘‘intuitively, certain phonemes seem to inspire amusement’’ (p. 177). The claim that word-sounds can be intrinsically funny even without a clear meaning might seem a little extreme and counter to conventional assumptions of an arbitrary relationship between language forms and meaning or affect (Schmidtke et al., 2014, p. 1). However, non-arbitrary sound-meaning relationships are found in the psychological literature on speech errors (Fromkin, 1971), on phonaesthemes (Otis and Sagi, 2008), on a variety of linguistic features (Schmidtke et al., 2014), in a variety of languages (Bergen, 2004), and even for emotional and aesthetic effects (Nweke, 2013). Studies of children’s word play and humour also show that some word sounds appear to have an intrinsically humorous quality for children (Ely and McCabe, 1994) and research on recognition of emotion in word-like non-words and in foreign language words has shown that people can recognise emotional content even without recognising meaning (Pell et al., 2009). In addition, a wide variety of research into emotion in music has shown powerful correlations between particular pieces of music and emotional judgements (Va¨stfja¨ll, 2002) and even that young children reliably and consistently judge ‘‘humorous music’’ as humorous (LeBlanc et al., 1992). In short, the idea that Dahl’s neologisms might have an inherent humorous effect is not as radical as it might at first appear. Furthermore, in addition to formal research, if we focus on music rather than on language, a relationship between sound and feeling is clearly a commonly felt everyday experience. Or, as Dahl explains, through The BFG: ‘And sometimes human beans is overcome when they is hearing wonderous music. They is getting shivers down their spindels. Right or left?’ ‘Right,’ Sophie said. ‘So the music is saying something to them. It is sending a message. I do not think the human beans is knowing what that message is, but they is loving it just the same.’ ‘That’s about right,’ Sophie said. (p. 90) The humour of Dahl’s created language was one of the most commonly repeated points in the BFG reviews on The Spaghetti Club, and it seems likely that Dahl has managed to create words which do have some inherent humour. If this is correct and Dahl’s neologisms are often inherently humorous, then this can possibly explain how some of the obscure real words Dahl uses can be perceived as created words. If
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words like ‘‘whangdoodle’’ have the same humorous phonological qualities as the neologisms then they will likely be processed in a similar way. The inherent humour of Dahl’s neologisms can also help to explain how they fail to disrupt the reading experience. If readers identify words as both original and humorous then this should be sufficient to allow them to recognise that, like the humorous language play which children commonly engage in (Crystal, 1996, pp. 330–334), the words do not need to be fully understood. As such the cognitive load on the reader can be reduced, and the neologisms can be enjoyed in much the same way as the BFG imagines human beans enjoy music.
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