Which Came First?

I'm wondering which came first. No, not the chicken or the egg.

I was talking with College Dude, our son, today. After our phone conversation was finished, I started thinking about some of the conversations we had during his last visit home.

One of those conversations centered around unusual words College Dude had come across in the course of his schoolwork.

One of those words was flibbertigibbet. I tracked the word down in the dictionary. The definition is a silly, flighty person.

Seems to me it would take a silly, flighty person to come up with a word like flibbertigibbet in the first place.

Which begs the question. What came first, the word or the person?