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Words painted on backdrops, words read to us with zest, words falling from the sky, words (and noises) streaming from the gleeful Children's Theatre of Charlotte audience. Books filling countless shelves, books that release cyclones when opened, books whose torn or trimmed pages can be turned into beards and lions' manes and even a scruffy little black dog named Toto.

"Of the Dickens citations in the OED, 258 citations are the earliest recorded by the dictionary for a particular word, and 1,586 are the earliest for a particular sense of a word. Dickens was certainly an innovative writer, but these examples are not necessarily his own coinages. ... Very often the words that Dickens ushered in were from the earthy slang associated with the working class, the theatre, or the criminal underworld, and Dickens did much to make these once "vulgar" words mainstream. Dickens's very first novel, The Pickwick Papers from 1837, introduced such slang terms as butter-fingers ("a clumsy person"), flummox ("bewilder"), sawbones ("surgeon"), and whizz-bang ("sound of a gunshot"). ... One way that Dickens devised new words was by adding suffixes to old ones. He made good use of the -y suffix to make adjectives (mildewy, bulgy, swishy, soupy, waxy, trembly) and -iness to make nouns (messiness, cheesiness, fluffiness, seediness). ... Finally, no discussion of Dickensian language would be complete without mentioning the richly evocative names of his characters."

Video featuring British historical linguist and Early Modern English scholar, David Crystal, and his son, Ben Crystal, speaking about their work in re: speaking Shakespeare's words as they originally sounded.