Samuel Johnson would not have had the term 'Curlism' in mind when he expressed regret that, even as his dictionary was being printed, 'some words are budding, and some falling away.' Yet it is a good enough instance of the shifts that Johnson deplored. 'Bowdlerism' still survives in the vocabulary of publishing to denote prudish expurgation; Curlism, which meant the opposite (and more besides), was already fading from the language when the figure who inspired the term, the flamboyant bookseller Edmund Curll, had been dead for less than a decade. Chatterton was still using it a generation later ('I know the art of Curlism, pretty well,' his persona Harry Wildfire boasts), and the phenomenon still flourishes in the media today, though without the ingenious, gleeful panache of its first and greatest exponent. But you won't find 'Curlism' in Johnson's or more recent English dictionaries, including even the inhibition-free OED online (which cites Curll himself just twice, as the earliest source for two entirely characteristic locutions, 'onanism' and 'onanist').

LRB 13 December 2007 | PDF Download