Authors Electric

       One of my favourite words is malmaroking.   I learned it decades ago, and loved it for its exactness.  I shall probably never be able to use it, since it means ‘ the carousing of sailors in ice-bound ships.’  Though I suppose I could write a whole book just to include it. Or maybe just a short story.      Flash-fiction?            It's not the kind of carousing you find outside nightclubs at a weekend, you note.  This carousing is done exclusively by sailors – and even if the nightclubs were crammed with drunken sailors, still no malmaroking would be done, because they’d be on land. And merely having a ship load of drunken sailors isn’t enough either, because it has to be an ice-bound ship.  Only once ship and rowdy, drunken crew are ice-bound would all the criteria be met, and you could honestly say that malmaroking ensued.      ...

(1-A. 2-A. 3-B. 4-B. 5-B. 6-A. 7-A. 8-A. 9-A. 10- A. I'll explain later).  Did you catch Stephen Fry on Radio 2 recently, talking about words? He’s something of an expert having worked on a series of programmes about plain English. His main point this time was that, unlike more regimented languages, English is constantly evolving, to embrace how people actually use words. I hadn’t really thought about it, that dictionaries record usage rather than dictating the rules. What a great example of honouring creativity! How sensible! Fry pointed out this aspect of our beautiful language, when he was asked if he really was the creator of the term ‘luvvie’ for an actor sort of person. The OED lists him as the first person to use the word.  Fry quoted another example of his creating a word that has entered common usage, with his friend Hugh Laurie. The word was ‘spoffle’, to described the muffler spongy bit which is placed on the end of a microphone during recording. He...