Mimeographed Sheets Evolved into Best-Seller

When Dr. William Harmon, James G. Hanes professor in the humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, decides that he -- and the world -- need a new word, he doesn't run to the dictionary or thesaurus as most people do.

He just makes one up. Outrageous? Maybe so, but at one time or another, someone had to make up every word in the English language. And in every other language ever spoken or written on the planet too.

Besides, as a poet, Harmon has a bona fide poetic license to do whatever he wants with words. And as longtime editor of the best-selling "A Handbook to Literature," who's going to stop him?

Prentice Hall recently published the ninth edition of his handbook, which over 66 years has become a fixture not only in libraries around the globe, but also in the personal collections of countless serious students and professors of British and American literature. Various earlier editions have sold more than 1.5 million copies.

"As far as we know, this book started out in the early 1930s as a mimeographed or carbon-copied item in the English Department at UNC," Harmon said. "That was because the faculty believed undergraduates, and graduate students especially, arrived at the university without much background in the particulars of grammar, versification, rhetoric and so forth."

That handout became so popular with both instructors and students that UNC English professors William F. Thrall and Addison Hibbard published it as a book in 1936. Since then, first C. Hugh Holman and later his friend and colleague Harmon edited subsequent editions. The latter has been the sole editor of editions five through nine and is now working on the tenth.

The book -- a dictionary of literary terms -- has never been out of print. It covers the word waterfront, so to speak, from Ireland's "Abbey Theatre" to filmmakers' "zoom shot" with more than 2,000 stops along the way. Want to know about accents, braggadocio, chanteys, doggerel, existentialism, iambic pentameter, pulp magazines, rhymes, romanticism, yellow journalism or zeugmas? They're all included. Other popular features are complete lists of Nobel Prizes for literature and Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, poetry and drama.

Amazon.com reviewers consistently give the handbook five stars.

"Like my predecessors, every time I've had a pass at it, I've enlarged it with terminology people might find interesting -- including words from printing, bookselling, newspapers, computers and the like," Harmon said. "If a term conceivably relates to something someone possibly could want to know about, I have left it in. A few I have dropped over the years."

Harmon said working on the book has not just been a mechanical academic exercise some would see as drudgery. It also has been a surprisingly creative effort.

"I've published books of poetry, and this is about as much fun as a matter of expression and creativity as anything," he said. "Even my family has been closely involved. My daughter Sally has been an editorial assistant since her pre-teen years and also, I'm proud to say, furnished the jacket design for the ninth edition. My son Will, who is 28 now, has helped out with it since he was 11 years old."Sally Harmon also contributed many of the terms related to graphic arts, video and the Internet. His wife Anne helped enormously as a reader and sounding board.

One of the included definitions is for "Hobson-Jobson," a term Will discovered to describe the process of transforming less familiar foreign terms such as the German "Tannenbaum" in the Christmas song into something more familiar such as "atomic bomb." Another example of such was playwright Tennessee Williams having one of his characters in "the Glass Menagerie " convert the medical term "pleurosis" into "blue roses."

Among words Harmon coined are "hieronymy" and "poikilomorphism." The former is the idea of sacred names and naming, while the latter refers to rare cases of poets' preserving rhythm, meter and stanza length while changing the rhyme scheme from stanza to stanza.

He also gave a new meaning to the word "promotion," which results from a writer's assigning stress to a syllable in a song or poem that would normally go unstressed, such as the final syllable of the phrase "Sweet land of liberty."

Like the most famous English lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, who defined "lexicographer" in part as "a harmless drudge," the UNC English professor tries when possible to give his definitions personality.

Consider, for example, the first half of his entry on "Byronism":"Even during his lifetime (1788-1824), Lord Byron provoked the coining of such terms as "Byronic," "Byroniad" and "Byronism" -- all in recognition of his unique electricity. He was fabulously wealthy as well as fabulously handsome; he possessed extraordinary charm and wit; he was a genuine peer, a genuine patriot and a great sinner; he was a charismatic hero or villain -- and he was a literary genius of the first order.

Catching the first full tide of modern journalistic celebrity and publicity, he was capable of touching modesty and self-mockery. He was -- or invented -- a model of the mysteriously brooding, bitter, vaguely northern loner, sexually polymorphous, reckless and doomed, and always dangerous."