The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Miltonic Meanders

A boring commentary in ten books of meandering verse on the first chapter of Genesis …

… is how Voltaire described Paradise Lost, the great epic poem by John Milton. Voltaire was wrong, of course. Paradise Lost is mainly about Adam and Eve, and that pomavorous couple don’t actually appear until the second chapter of the book of Genesis.

Paradise Lost is about the fall of Satan from Heaven and the fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden into the Land of Nod, and is generally speaking a downhill poem. However, it’s still the greatest epic in English, an achievement that’s largely due to its being almost the only epic in English that anybody has ever bothered writing, and certainly the only one that anyone has ever bothered reading. It’s also the origin of Pandemonium.

In Milton’s poem, when Satan is thrown out of Heaven and into Hell, the first thing he decides to do is to get a roof over his head. So he summons all the other fallen angels and gets them to build a huge and hideous palace. And just as the Pantheon is the temple of All the Gods, so Satan decides to name his new pied-à-terre All the Demons or Pandemonium, and that’s how the word was invented.

Of course, since then pandemonium has come to mean anywhere that’s a bit noisy, but it all goes back to Milton’s idea, and his fondness for inventing language.

Milton adored inventing words. When he couldn’t find the right term he just made one up: impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing, Satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, sensuous, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, lovelorn, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental and cooking. All Milton’s. When it came to inventive wording, Milton actually invented the word wording.

Awe-struck? He invented that one too, along with stunning and terrific.

And, because he was a Puritan, he invented words for all the fun things of which he disapproved. Without dear old Milton we would have no debauchery, no depravity, no extravagance, in fact nothing enjoyable at all.

Poor preachers! People always take their condemnations as suggestions. One man’s abomination is another’s good idea. This is the law of unintended consequences, and yes, Milton invented the word unintended. He probably didn’t intend or imagine that one of his obscurer words would end up as the title for this book. Etymologicon, meaning a book containing etymologies, first crops up in his essay on Nullities in Marriage.

Whether you’re all ears or obliviously tripping the light fantastic, you’re still quoting Milton. ‘[T]rip it as ye go, / On the light fantastic toe’ is from his poem L’Allegro, ‘In a light fantastic round’ and ‘all ear’ are from his play Comus. When a tennis player has an advantage, that’s Milton’s too, or at least he invented advantage in its sporting sense. When all Hell breaks loose, that’s Paradise Lost, because when Satan escapes from Hell a curious angel asks him:

We rely on Milton. For example, he invented space travel, or at least made it linguistically possible. The word space had been around for centuries, but it was Milton who first applied it to the vast voids between the stars. Satan comforts his fallen angels by telling them that though they have been banned from Heaven,

And that’s why we don’t have outer distance or void stations or expanse ships. Because of Milton we have 2001: A Space Odyssey and David Bowie’s song ‘Space Oddity’. Indeed, if there were any justice in pop music John Milton would be raking in the royalties from Jeff Beck’s ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, because Milton invented silver linings:[2]

This chapter is becoming rather quotationist, which is one of Milton’s words that didn’t catch on. So let us proceed to pastures new (‘At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue,/Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’). Let us forget about the silver linings and concentrate on the clouds.