If Shakespeare is in the lead in adding words and phrases to English (and actually he might not be), Charles Dickens is the champion of character names, particularly for his villains. Dickens’ characters often have funny, ironic, sarcastic, or otherwise telling names, and some of them also enter the language. It’s not terribly unusual, even today, to hear someone called a scrooge. Other Dickensian names suggesting a certain degree of intellectual challenge include Mr. Pumpkinskull, Bumble, and Muddlebranes.
Mr. Pecksniff is a character from Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). He’s supposedly a surveyor and architect, but Dickens points out that he didn’t survey anything other than the countryside view he could see from his window. Moreover, “of his architectural doings, nothing was clearly known, except that he had never designed or built anything.” In other words, Seth Pecksniff’s professional career was a mismatch between what he said and what he did. His personal life was pretty much the same; he talked about morality and benevolence all the time, but his actions were sneaky, mean, and hurtful. Dickens himself wrote “Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.”
Dickens books were so popular and his characters so striking that “pecksniff” entered the language only seven years after “Martin Chuzzlewit” was published; “pecksniffian” was being used as an adjective by 1851 and not much later showed up as a noun as well: “pecksniffery.” Those words are becoming less common, but they’re still in use today.
There are some words that sort of sound like they could be based on Dickens characters, but actually are not. “Pettifogging” is a good one. It originally described unscrupulous lawyers who tried to create large issues over minor cases — and by “originally,” I mean as early as about 1560. Yes, there were lawyers even then, and yes, they were the objects of derision and contempt in those days too. Calling one a “pettifogger” was an attempt to insult them (except just like today, they were probably immune to insults).
“Petty” means small or unimportant, and comes from the French word “petit” (small). “Fogger,” on the other hand, is less clear. It’s possible that it derives from a family name, of all things. The Fugger family were prominent merchants and bankers in the 1400s and 1500s. They were based in Augsburg, Germany, but well known throughout Europe, particularly northern Europe where Germanic languages were spoken. Most of those languages began to use the word “fugger” to mean wealthy, greedy people whose business practices were somewhat less than ethical. English is partly a Germanic language, and by the late 1500s included the word “fogger” to mean an untrustworthy businessman. So that might be the “fogger” in “pettyfogger”. On the other hand, the word “pettyfactor” also existed at the time. A “factor” used to be a financial agent, and a “pettyfactor,” well, looked after very small financial issues. So “pettifogger” might be an adaptation of “pettyfactor” — or, since the words were contemporaneous, it might have been the other way around.
“Pettifogging” is still in use, but today refers to anybody, not just lawyers, who overemphasizes trivial things. Such as, you might argue, obscure words and their origins!
