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The -rama suffix has been around for longer than you might think. ‘Visited the Cosmorama,’ wrote Ellen Weeton, a Lancashire governess, in 1824. ‘I had now seen many of the -ramas in London, Ignoramus and all.’ Parson Woodforde had seen ‘the Panorama, a fine deception in painting of the British & Russian Fleets at Spithead’ in 1793. The Diorama, invented by Louis Daguerre and Charles Bouton, opened in 1823 at Regent’s Park. The Cosmorama showed scenes from round the world. The success of Cinerama in the 1950s revived the word-form, so that liquoramas appeared and launderamas too.
To fudge was, in the 18th century, to bodge a job of work. It was also an exclamation meaning ‘nonsense’, and in the 19th century a verb emerged, meaning ‘talk nonsense’. The sense of ‘blur distinctions; to prevaricate or temporise’ was noted in 1888 and lay low for nearly a century, until David Owen in a piece for the Guardian in 1980 declared: ‘We are fed up with fudging and mudging, with mush and slush.’ I wonder whether he had at the back of his mind Browning’s Mister Sludge the Medium, a deceiver. I also wonder whether Boris Johnson’s coinage was influenced by Balzac, who in Le Père Goriot (1835) wrote: ‘The diorama, a recent invention …
had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with -rama.’
One lodger criticises another for saying froitorama for ‘frost’ instead of froidorama. This in turn, I can’t help thinking, has affinities with jive-talk and the productive suffix -aroony. So the next delay might be a fudgearoony.
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