Sometimes when you’re reading a book, you run across a word you’ve never heard before, but you can usually figure out what it means by its context. I learned many words that way, and I was sometimes wrong. I should have looked them up, but who wants to break the spell of a good book? Some of those words were just made up by the writer. John Green runs down a whole bunch of examples in this latest video from mental_floss.
Speech recognition is getting better. I predict that within the next 10 years it will be good enough that the back archives of all the available TV shows, news shows, radio broadcasts will be searchable. We might then have some evidence that people said "pie hole" before King wrote it down. Archive.org already offers a service like that, at https://archive.org/details/tv?q=%22pie%20hole%22 , but it doesn't extend that far backwards in time. Etymologists no doubt look forward to that new era.
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