'Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions'

“The air’s already tainted with the swarms / Of insects, which against you rise in arms. / Word-peckers, paper-rats, book-scorpions, / Of wit corrupted, the unfashioned sons.” 

For connoisseurs of invective, this is fairly tame stuff, but I like it. One writer, Andrew Marvell, is defending another writer, the poet Richard Lovelace, against still more writers. The source is “To His Noble Friend, Mr. Richard Lovelace, Upon His Poems” (1649), a Royalist-favoring poem in a contentious age. Here Marvell is father to Dryden, grandfather to Pope and Swift. It’s the third line I’ll remember. I doubt “word-pecker” carries our smut-minded connotations. The OED clarifies things: “[perhaps punningly after woodpecker n.] chiefly humorous a person who trifles or plays with, or quibbles over, words.” We know the type.

 

Francis Grose in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) gives a more benign definition: “a punster, one who plays upon words.” Which brings us to Charles Lamb. The OED cites his usage in a letter to his friend Charles Lloyd, who had just sent Lamb his translation of the Odyssey. On March 10, 1810, Lamb writes:  

 

“I have picked out what I think blemishes, but they are but a score of words (I am a mere word pecker) in six times as many pages. The rest all gave me pleasure . . .”

 

Lamb gracefully apologizes for presuming to criticize Lloyd’s gift: “I am ashamed to carp at words, but I did it in obedience to your desires, and the plain reason why I did not acknowledge your kind present sooner was that I had no criticisms of value to make.”