10 whimsical words coined by Lewis Carroll

Many of us will have our first encounter with strange, long, unfamiliar terms in the books of Beatrix Potter – ‘superfluous’, ‘implored’ and ‘affronted’ were just some that intrigued me as a small person – because she deliberately included at least one difficult word in each story. It takes us back to rhythm and rhyme: even when we don’t understand

two firm favourites in the Arsenal manager’s own lexicon: the adverb footballistically (‘footballistically, he’s ready for the first team’), and the adjective handbrakeish (‘I felt we were a little handbrakish today’).

Look up “villain,” for instance, and you’ll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure back from centuries of iniquity, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immorality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You’ll find ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, repro

Now, as a fact, these catchwords themselves often are paradoxes. These catchwords themselves are often intrinsically contradictory or improbable. So that, by the simple operation of stating the dull and obvious truth, one may gain quite a picturesque reputation for dashing and dazzling paradox.