"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 09/10/17 (shizzle, bling, pulling out all the stops)

I was talked on Friday about words that we have borrowed from the theatre and from the arts. And I'm continuing that theme today. I'm going to talk about music and literature. Music, particularly recently, has given us lots of terms. So, shizzle and bling, which has gone into the dictionary quite recently. But an older one is "pulling out all the stops". And Richard Lloyd e-mailed in to ask where that one came from. And it's a good one, it goes back to the construction of the olf pipe organs. And these instruments had stops, or knobs, really, to control the airflow that went through them. And if you wanted to increase the volume, you would pull the knobs right out. So as simple as that, but one, certanly, that came from music. But words from literature are numerous. So many first names, in fact, were born in literature, and I'll come to that another day. But Lewis Carroll was a brilliant neologiser. So he couned lots and lots of wonderful words, including chortle, which I love. That's a blend of chuckle and snort. And galumph, which actually was a blend of gallop and triumph. Today, we use it slightly differently, to mean to trudge. But he loved the word galumphing about. Namby-pamby goes back to a spat, a literary spat, a couple centuries ago, when Ambrose Philips was a writer of a really sentimental verse, and not many people liked it, so they called him namby-pamby. That was his nickname. Pandemonium was Milton, of course. Yahoo was Gulliver's Travels. And nerd was first mentioned in Dr. Seuss. So, so many words that we have taken fron the literature, all of them kind of slipped into the mainsrteam and lost... mostly lost traces of their very beginnings. But we owe books an awful lot.