Join the Hyphen Crowd
Away to reinvigorate a lacklustre lexicon is to pull together words that have never been tethered before – a little like constructing an impromptu meal from random reached-for tins dragged to light from the fumbled darkness of a kitchen cupboard. (Chutney pasta anyone? Anyone?) Charlotte Brontë was a genius of such curiously compelling compounds. To her it is likely we owe the origin of ‘self-doubt’ and ‘Wild-West’ as well as that activity to which many of us have found ourselves suddenly engaging with obsessive vigour: ‘spring-clean’, which Brontë niftily neologised in a letter she wrote in April 1848.
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