Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (17 page)

MONOLOGOPHOBE.
Creation of American journalist and editor
Theodore M. Bernstein
(1904–1979), who defined this creature in his 1965 writer’s handbook
The Careful Writer
as “a writer who would rather walk naked in front of Saks Fifth Avenue than be caught using the same word more than once in three lines.” See also
SYNONYMOMANIA
.

MORON.
A word created by eugenicist
H. H. Goddard
(1866-1957), director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls in New Jersey. In a 1910 journal article, Goddard gave a stunningly broad definition of moron as one who is lacking in intelligence, one who is deficient in judgment or sense. To Goddard, alcoholics, criminals, prostitutes, unemployed, and people who acted immorally in general were obviously lacking intelligence, judgment, or sense, and were, therefore, morons. Those involved in the eugenics movement believed that the human species could be improved by selective breeding—encouraging those from a superior gene pool and discouraging the inferior members of society including morons. The term is now considered offensive, and along with
imbecile
and
idiot
, these terms have been abolished in clinical practice.
⁹

MOTEL.
A roadside hotel designed for motorists with easy access from one’s parked car. A blend of
motor
and
hotel,
it was coined by architect
Arthur S. Heineman
(1878–1972),
who copyrighted the term after opening the first one in 1925 in San Luis Obispo, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. For $1.25 a night, guests were issued a two-room bungalow with a kitchen and a private adjoining garage.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.
A great deal of fuss over something of no importance. The phrase is the title of
Shakespeare
’s comedic play of the same name written about 1588–1599. He had used the word
ado
, which means business or activity, in an earlier play—
Romeo and Juliet,
“Weele keepe no great adoe, a Friend or two.”

MUDHOOK.
An anchor in early American slang that makes its debut in print in
James Fenimore Cooper
’s 1827 great novel of the sea,
The Red Rover:
“He would fasten her to the spot with good hempen cables and iron mud-hooks.”

MUDSCAPE.
A landscape composed largely or entirely of mud. A creation of
O. Henry
in 1908 in the “Gentle Grafter”: “The third day of the rain it slacked up awhile in the afternoon, so me and Andy walked out to the edge of town to view the mudscape.”

MUGGLE.
A person with no magical powers and by extension anyone regarded inferior, especially in the workplace in the realm of the Harry Potter novels by
J. K. Rowling
. The
OED
says she first mentioned
muggles
in 1997 in 
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: “
Rejoice, for You-Know-Who has gone at last! Even Muggles like yourself should be celebrating this happy, happy day!”
*
¹⁰

Rowling has been titled the world’s first billion-dollar author, having earned that amount from her Harry Potter books. She is also, according to
Forbes
magazine, one of only five self-made female billionaires up to 2004 when she hit the billion-dollar mark.
¹¹

MUGWUMPS.
New York Sun
editor
Charles Dana
(1819–1897) created this term to describe those who desert their political party to support another candidate, particularly the Republicans who would not support the candidacy of James G. Blaine, the Republican candidate for president in 1884.

MUNCHKIN.
A minor player; derogatory term for someone who is unimportant though often endearing. Alluding to the diminutive creatures in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
created by
L. Frank Baum
(1856–1919) in both his 1900 book and the 1939 motion picture in which the Munchkins help Dorothy in her quest for the city of Oz. According to the
Collins English Dictionary
, Munchkin is also a breed of medium-sized cat with short legs.

MURDERMONGRESS.
A female writer of murder stories, a term invented by
Ogden Nash
to describe Agatha Christie in his 1957 anthology
You Can’t Get There from Here
. The word was fashioned to rhyme with Library of Congress.

MUSCLEMAN.
James Fenimore Cooper
’s term for a man of superior strength. As he first used it in 1838 in
Homeward Bound
: “I suppose these muscle men will not have much use for any but the oyster-knives, as I am informed they eat with their fingers.” According to the
OED
, the use of the term to mean a man who uses force to get his way does not come into the language until 1929.
¹²

MUTT AND JEFF.
Two people with widely divergent characteristics in the manner of the mismatched comic strip pair extended to a lowercase metaphor by American poet
E. E. Cummings
(1894–1962) in 1917 when he wrote: “By failing to get up . . . I escaped departing with the bums mutts and jeffs (not to say ginks, slobs, and punks) who came over with us.”
¹³

*
When the author of this book, born in 1939, was young and under the weather he was served milk toast from a recipe of his grandmother’s that probably came from her kitchen bible Fannie Merritt Farmer’s
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1918).

Here is the recipe for Milk Toast from that book:

1 pint scalded milk

½ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

4 tablespoons cold water

2½ tablespoons bread flour

6 slices dry toast

Add cold water gradually to flour to make a smooth, thin paste. Add to milk, stirring constantly until thickened, cover, and cook twenty minutes; then add salt and butter in small pieces. Dip slices of toast separately in sauce; when soft, remove to serving dish. Pour remaining sauce over all.

*
It is a name that has an odd unexplained appeal to those who name commercial ventures, especially restaurants. Within ten miles of the author’s house there is an Afghan takeout, a kebob restaurant, and a sushi restaurant all named Moby-Dick. Also, the name of Captain Ahab’s first mate in the novel is a Quaker seaman from Nantucket named Starbuck, which was adopted as the name for the Starbucks international chain of coffee shops. Owner of the chain, Howard Schultz, noted in his 2011 book
Pour Your Heart Into It
that [Starbucks cofounder Gordon] Bowker and other investors discussed naming the company Pequod after the ship in
Moby-Dick
. Then they decided no one would want to drink a cup of “Pee-quod.” (http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/06/29/how-starbucks-got-its-name/)

*
According to Arthur Waldhorn’s
Concise Dictionary of the American Language
(p. 111) and other sources,
muggles
is a “narcotic addict’s term for marijuana.” The
OED
lists a number of additional senses for this word (resembling a fishtail; a young woman, etc.) spanning from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. Anu Garg discussed the many meanings of muggle in a 2013 entry in his
A Word a Day
Internet service: “And that’s how a language grows. Old words die—or take on a new life. New words appear. Language wordstock is replenished, refreshed, and the language remains vibrant and serviceable, ready to describe new concepts, ideas, and objects.”

N

NADSAT.
Name for the dialectical (and diabolical) slang created by British writer
Anthony Burgess
(1917–1993) for his violent gang characters, Alex and his
droogs
(pals), in his 1962 novel
A Clockwork Orange.
Like many lexical items in the novel, this word derives from transliterated or anglicized Russian, along with
baboochka
(old woman),
bezoomny
(mad),
bitva
(battle),
gulliver
(head),
horrorshow
(good),
koshka
(cat),
krovvy
(blood),
malchick
(boy),
skazzed
(said),
voloss
(hair), and many others. Nadsat also includes some Cockney-derived words and other inventions:
viddy
(see),
pretty polly
(money),
platties
(clothes), and so on. A Cockney expression, “as queer as a clockwork orange” means “very queer indeed,” with or without a sexual implication.
¹

NASALISM.
Nasal pronunciation. A term created and applied to the modern American voice by
Oscar Wilde
, who never got to hear Bob Dylan to whom the term was later applied. Wilde introduced the term in the sentence: “The nasalism of the modern American had been retained from the Puritan Fathers.”
²

NATURE DEFICIT DISORDER.
Author and child advocacy expert
Richard Louv
coined the term to describe modern children growing up without contact with the natural world. In his 2005 book
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,
Louv links the lack of nature in children’s lives to depression, obesity, attention deficit disorder, anxiety, and stress. The term aptly applies to adults, individuals, families, and communities many times over.

NEOPHILIAC.
A lover of the new, a pejorative term created in 1970 by
Christopher Booker
, British writer and editor of the satirical magazine
Private Eye
. His book
The Neophiliacs
had a sharp edge and his thesis was that when a society is in a state of disintegration and flux, its members opt for false revolutions in style and manner over genuine self-renewal. The dream of a new “fun” England had, in Booker’s view, darkened into a nightmare of drugs, depravity, and anger. Critic Melvin Maddocks, reviewing the book for the
Christian Science Monitor,
summed it up this way: “The Neophiliacs have granted themselves a doubtful gift of freedom without a sense of purpose. They are free to Do Their Thing—if only they could remember what it is they thought they wanted to do.”