‘The Walking OED’: Oliver Sacks’s Widower Remembers His Etymophilia (Love Of Words)

Bill Hayes: “He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). … Oliver loved words so much, he often dreamed of them, and sometimes dreamed them up. One morning, six years ago, I found a phrase he’d written on the white board in the kitchen. All it said was ‘5 a.m. Nepholopsia.'”