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 postnatal, which has allowed
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