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Dec. 17, 2020 6:28 pm ET Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer analyzes the origins of words in the news. Read previous columns here. When the British spy novelist John le Carré died last Saturday, many obituaries noted how his gripping tales of Cold War espionage were informed by his own experiences in the U.K. intelligence agency MI5. His firsthand knowledge of spycraft provided verisimilitude for those bestselling works, beginning with “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” in 1963. That verisimilitude extended to the jargon of spying in his novels, which had the ring of truth. But in fact, le Carré would often make up his own terms. As he revealed to a BBC interviewer in 1976, “I’ve used some authentic words, but I prefer my own really.” Those le Carré-isms include “scalphunter,” “honey-trap,” “lamplighter” and “pavement artist.”

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