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

Morphing De Quincey and Shelley

Morpheus, from which morphine derives, was the Greek god of dreams. He was the son of Sleep and the brother of Fantasy, and he lived in a cave near the underworld where he would make dreams and then hang them upon a withered elm until they were ready to use.

Morpheus was the shaper of dreams – his name comes from the Greek morphe meaning shape. This is why, if you are amorphous, it doesn’t mean that you’re fresh out of morphine, but instead that you are shapeless.

Drugs and dreams are an easy association. If you smoke a pipe full of opium you will, like as not, fall asleep and have a pipe dream. The most famous consumer of opium was a nineteenth-century fellow called Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a memoir called Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which contains a wonderful and strange account of his drugged dreams:

De Quincey’s opium dreams sound a little less than fun, and much of his biography is about his efforts to give up the drug. The book is much more moving than it is honest.

In fact, when De Quincey wrote his Confessions, he was simply out of cash and couldn’t afford a fix. Luckily the book was so successful that he was able to maintain himself in top-drawer narcotics for the rest of his life. This life was surprisingly long. While near-contemporaries like Shelley, Keats and Byron fell out of boats, perished of consumption or died feverishly in Greece, De Quincey, drugged up to the eyeballs and beyond, survived them all by 35 years and died of a fever at the over-ripe age of 74. He had been taking opium for 55 years.

During his long and meandering literary career, De Quincey was a master-inventor of words. His opium-fumigated brain was a mint where neologisms were coined at a remarkable rate. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes 159 words to him. Many of these, like passiuncle (a small passion), are forgotten; yet many survive.

Without De Quincey we would have no subconscious, no entourages, no incubators, no interconnections. We would be able neither to intuit nor to reposition things. He was phenomenally inventive, earth-shatteringly so. He even came up with the word post-natal, which has allowed people to be depressed ever since.

Ante-natal had already been invented by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley wrote an (earth-shatteringly tedious) poem called ‘Prince Athenase’. The story goes like this: basically, there’s a prince and he’s great and stuff, but like every second bloody hero of romantic poetry he’s mysteriously sad. Nobody knows why.

Others believed that Shelley had talent, but needed a damned fine editor. Like De Quincey, when Shelley couldn’t think of a word he just made one up. By the time he drowned at the age of 29 he had already come up with the words spectral, anklet, optimistic (in the sense of a hopeful disposition), and heartless (in the sense of cruel). He invented bloodstain, expatriate, expressionless, interestingly, legionnaire, moonlit, sunlit, pedestrianize (although not in our sense), petty-minded, steam-ship, unattractive, undefeated, unfulfilling, unrecognized, wavelet and white-hot.

He even invented the phrase national anthem.