Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (23 page)

SURREALISM.
Italian-born French poet
Guillaume Apollinaire
(1880–1918) coined the word to describe the fusion of radically new arts, in a review of the ballet
Parade
, which had a script by Jean Cocteau, scenography by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, and choreography by Léonide Massine. Apollinaire created his own surrealist play,
Les Mamelles de Tirésias
, staged in June 1917.
¹⁵

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
Although commonly associated with Charles Darwin, the phrase was coined by
Herbert Spencer
(1820–1903), an English philosopher. It is the process by which organisms that are less well adapted to their environment tend to perish and better-adapted organisms tend to survive. Unlike Charles Darwin, for whom evolution was without direction or morality, Spencer believed evolution to be both progressive and good.

SVENGALI.
A person who exerts power over another through the force of personality or will. It is the name of a character in
George du Maurier
’s (1834–1896) 1894 novel
Trilby,
in which the title character, a beautiful woman, falls under the spell of Svengali who employs hypnotism to turn her into a great singer.

SYNONYMOMANIA.
A word created by
Theodore M. Bernstein
to describe the “compulsion to call a spade successively a garden implement and an earth-turning tool.” Both this term and the complementary monologophobia appear in Bernstein’s
The Careful Writer.

*
Later in the same novel Bond, after losing millions of dollars in a game of poker, is asked if he wants his martini shaken or stirred, and snaps, “Do I look like I give a damn?”

T

T-SHIRT.
The name of this torso-covering undergarment certainly comes from its T shape and was not introduced in the United States until World War I when they were modeled on similar garments worn by European soldiers. The first citing of the term given by the
OED
is by
F. Scott Fitzgerald
in 1920 in
This Side of Paradise:
“Amory, provided with ‘six suits summer underwear . . . one sweater or T shirt,’ set out for New England, the land of schools.”
¹

TABOO (TABU).
Forbidden. Imported into English by British explorer
Captain James Cook
(1728–1779) in 1777 in his
Journal of a Voyage Round the World in H.M.S. Endeavour 1768–1771.
He wrote of a dinner at Tongataboo, a Polynesian island: “When dinner came on table not one of my guests would sit down or eat a bit of any thing that was there. Every one was
Tabu
, a word of a very comprehensive meaning but in general signifies forbidden.”
²

TAR BABY.
A problem that clings to you no matter what you do to get rid of it. The original
tar baby
is a doll covered with tar that appears in American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist
Joel Chandler Harris
’s (1848–1908)
Uncle Remus,
his first book of stories published in 1881. In the story of the tar baby, Brer Rabbit attempts to speak to the tar baby, which does not answer. He becomes angry and hits the tar baby, which sticks to him. The more he tries to punch the doll, the tighter it sticks to him.
Tar Baby
was also used by Toni Morrison as the title for her 1981 book that used it as a metaphor for strength. “At one time,” she said in a 1995 interview when asked to explain the title, “a tar pit was a holy place, at least an important place, because tar was used to build things. It held together things like Moses’ little boat and the pyramids. For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together.”
³

TARZAN.
Name for a person with real or imagined strength and agility. It comes from the name of the main character in a series of novels by American novelist
Edgar Rice Burroughs
(1875–1950), and in subsequent films and television series. Tarzan was orphaned in West Africa in his infancy and reared in the jungle by a mother ape. The character is introduced to the world in 1914 in the book
Tarzan of the Apes
. Burroughs was the first writer to incorporate himself, which he did in 1923. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. of Tarzana, California, still manages his properties.

TECHNOBABBLE.
Empty and/or obfuscatory technical talk from the title of
John Barry
’s 1976 book of the same title. The term was later blended with
trek
to form
treknobabble
to describe the particular technical gibberish employed in the various
Star Trek
series such as the dilithium crystals, which are used to power starships in the
Star Trek
universe.

TERMINOLOGICAL INEXACTITUDE.
Winston Churchill
’s 1906 euphemism for lying.

THE AMERICAN DREAM.
Phrase coined by American writer and historian
James Truslow Adams
(1878–1949) in 1931 in his book
The Epic of America
as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” The term and the concept have been fodder for playwrights who have explored what they see as its false promise: Edward Albee in his 1961
The American Dream
and Arthur Miller’s 1949
Death of a Salesman
among others.

THE BACK OF BEYOND.
A lonely forsaken place, real or imagined. It was first put into print by
Sir Walter Scott
in his novel
The Antiquary
, 1816: “You . . . whirled them to the back of beyond to look at the auld Roman camp.”

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST.
Term for the cream of the crop but sometimes employed ironically to describe leaders who are, for whatever reason or reasons, led to make gross errors in judgment. It is the title of
David Halberstam
’s (1934-2007) 1972 book about the policy makers who brought the United States into the Vietnam War.

THE EARTH MOVED.
A metaphoric phrase for sexual fulfillment coined by
Ernest Hemingway
in
his 1926 novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. In the story, Hemingway’s American hero, Robert Jordan, is fighting on the side of a guerrilla band of Spanish Loyalists against the Fascists; he makes love to Maria, a young woman who had been mistreated by the guerrillas. Then Jordan asks, ‘’But did thee feel the earth move?” She replied, yes. Later when pressed by one of the guerrilla leaders to tell what happened, she states only that “the earth moved.”

THE KING’S ENGLISH.
Name for English as it is spoken and written by educated people in southern England. It appears first in
William Shakespeare
’s
The Merry Wives of Windsor:
“Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the king’s English.”
Merry Wives
is Shakespeare’s only play set in England.

THE LIGHT FANTASTIC.
J
ohn Milton
coined “the light fantastic” to describe dancing in 1632.

THE PERFECT STORM.
A true lexical curiosity in that the
Oxford English Dictionary
recognized this as a positive metaphoric term (“a perfect storm of applause”) before it became a meteorological one. It is often misattributed to William Makepeace Thackery, who used it as an affirmation in his novel
Vanity Fair
.
*

Sebastian Junger
’s
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea
, published in 1997, recounts the story of the October 1991
perfect storm
that caused the loss of the Gloucester fishing boat
Andrea Gail
off the Nova Scotia coast. The general use of the term in the negative metaphoric sense stems from Junger’s book and has come to have a meaning akin to “worst case scenario.” It was invoked so many times to describe the financial crisis that began in 2007 that it was awarded that year’s top prize by Lake Superior State University in its list of words that deserve to be banned for overuse
.

THE RIGHT STUFF.
The character, courage, and savvy of test pilots and astronauts from the name of the 1979 bestselling book by
Tom Wolfe
and a 1983 movie based on the book. It can be argued that this may be the primary honorific of the space age
,
invoked sparingly in its original sense such as when it was applied to the crews of the
Columbia
and
Challenger
disasters. But when used more commonly it becomes little more than a public relations buzzword, as in, for example, a
September 16, 2002, press
release from NASA titled “The Right Stuff for Super Spaceships: Tomorrow’s Spacecraft Will Be Built Using Advanced Materials with Mind-Boggling Properties.”

Wolfe did not create the term. The earliest use of the term in the modern sense appears in the writing of
James Fenimore Cooper
in an article in the May 1845 issue of
Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art and Fashion,
in a biographical essay on Edward Preble. In attesting to Preble’s “courage, determination and high temper,” Cooper tells an anecdote in which Preble throws stones at a boating party that included his father, General Jedediah Preble, who had promised to board him then later refused. “It seems the old general decided that the boy had the ‘Right Stuff’ in him, and overlooked the gross impropriety of the assault, on account of its justice and spirit.”
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