Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (24 page)

Tom Wolfe resurrected the phrase to describe the mystique of flying associated with test pilots and the first men in space as the subhead for a series of four 1973 articles in
Rolling Stone
magazine called “Post-Orbital Remorse—The Brotherhood of The Right Stuff.”
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THE SHOT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD.
The phrase first appeared in
Ralph Waldo Emerson
’s song “Concord Hymn,” which was sung at the dedication of the monument in Concord, Massachusetts, commemorating the April 19, 1775, battles of Lexington and Concord.

THE SYSTEM.
Introduced by muckraker
Thomas William Lawson
(1857–1925) in his series “Frenzied Finance” in
Everybody’s Magazine.
It pertains to stock manipulation and trusts in general.

THO.
The word
though
as it was spelled at the
Chicago Tribune
between 1934 and 1975.
Colonel Robert McCormick
, the publisher of the paper, instituted spelling reforms in fits and starts, with varying degrees of success. In July 2010, Graham Meyer wrote in
Chicago
magazine, “Almost everyone today accepts
catalog
and
tranquility
but
frate
and
iland
not so much.”

THON.
A word coined in 1858 by American attorney and composer of church music
C. C. Converse
(1832–1918) as a neutral pronoun of the third person, common gender, a contracted and solidified form of
that one
as a substitute in cases in which the use of a restrictive pronoun (his/her) involves either inaccuracy or obscurity, where its nonemployment necessitates awkward repetition (his or her). For examples “If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to meet thon [for the one who comes.].” “Each pupil must learn thon’s lesson [for his or her own].”

TIGHTWAD.
 A miserly person; one who keeps his wad of paper money tightly rolled. This word first appears in 1900 in
George Ade
’s
More Fables
, a book in which familiar stories were told in slang.

TINTINNABULATION.
Edgar Allan Poe
popularized the term in 1831 for the sound of bells in the first stanza of his poem “The Bells”:

Hear the sledges with the bells—

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle

All the heavens, seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

TO THE MANNER BORN.
A
Shakespearean
construction from
Hamlet
meaning to be naturally accustomed to a certain way of doing things. The expression comes from
Hamlet
, act 1, scene 4, when Hamlet observes of the drunken atmosphere at Elsinore:

But to my mind, though I am native here

And to the manner born, it is a custom

More honour’d in the breach than the observance.

The phrase allows for punning, as in the BBC comedy series
To the Manor Born,
which ran from 1979 to 1981 and was also one of the classic “Britcom” hits on American PBS.

TRISKAIDEKAPHOBIA.
Morbid or irrational fear of the number 13. Coined by American psychiatrist and neurologist
Isador Henry Coriat
(1875–1943) from the Greek
tris
(3),
kai
(and),
deca
(10), and
phobia
(morbid fear).

TROGGLEHUMPER.
A nightmare in the world created by
Roald Dahl
, who also called them
bogthumpers
and
grobswitchers
as opposed to his names for pleasant dreams, which were known by melodious names of
winksquiffers
and
phizzwizards.

TRUTHINESS.
As defined by its coiner American political comedian
Stephen Colbert
, “truth that comes from the gut, not books” and introduced on Comedy Central’s
The Colbert Report
in October 2005.
The word was so popular that it eventually became
Merriam-Webster’s
number one Word of the Year for 2006 and was awarded the sixteenth annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”
Truthiness
begat
truthy
: in 2010, the
New York Times
discussed the status of political discourse saying that extensive effort goes into “disentangling reliable political Twitter posts from those that are merely truthy.”

TSUNAMI.
A brief series of long, high undulations on the surface of the sea caused by an earthquake or similar underwater disturbance often and until recently known by the misnomer tidal wave. This is a term that was first imported into English from the Japanese by author and translator
Lafcadio Hearn
(1850–1904), known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. Hearn was an international writer, known best for his books about Japan. This is his introductory line from 1897, which appears in his book
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields:
“‘
Tsunami!
’ shrieked the people; and then all shrieks and all sounds and all power to hear sounds were annihilated by a nameless shock . . . as the colossal swell smote the shore with a weight that sent a shudder through the hills.”
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TULGEY.
Word introduced by
Lewis Carroll
in 1871 in
Through the Looking-Glass
for thick, dense, and dark.

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood.

TWITTER.
As a verb this word has several meanings,
one of which is to tease.
The
OED
attributes the term to
Henry Fielding
in
Tom Jones:
“It doth not become such a one as you to
twitter
me.” The modern social network known as Twitter was named by its founder
Jack Dorsey
, who explained the decision to the
Los Angeles Times:
“We came across the word ‘twitter,’ and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds.’ And that’s exactly what the product was.”
⁶

*
The passage in full: “I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade at Naples preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing honest, lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.”

*
The term was used in this sense for humans and also for horses to describe racehorses with the ability to run. A horse named Miracle Sub is described in the Bettors Edge tip sheet in the
Chicago Defender
for July 9, 1975, as having the “Right Stuff.”

U

UFFISH.
A state of being
Lewis Carroll
envisioned as “when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish.”

UGLY AMERICAN.
Term used to describe an obnoxious Yankee abroad. It comes from the title of a novel by
William J. Lederer
and
Eugene Burdick
in which the term is used to describe an American who was compassionate and idealistic but physically unattractive. The misnomer has prevailed. In a 1988 interview, Costa Rican president Óscar Arias said, “If I had to advise Washington on its policy in Latin America, I’d say, ‘Please be nice—please stop being the ugly American.’”
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UGLY DUCKLING.
Term for a young person who shows no promise of the transformation that will come with maturity. It is an allusion to the story by
Hans Christian Andersen
first translated into English in 1846 called the “The Ugly Duckling.” The story tells of a homely little bird born in a barnyard who suffers abuse from the others around him until, much to his delight (and to the surprise of others), he matures into a beautiful swan.

UNBIRTHDAY.
A day that is not one’s birthday but is nevertheless worthy of celebration.
First observed by
Lewis Carroll
in
Through the Looking-Glass:
“‘What
is
an un-birthday present?’ ‘A present
given when it isn’t your birthday, of course.’”
²

UNCONSCIOUS.
The meaning of this term—being unaware of something existing within oneself—was coined by the eighteenth-century German romantic philosopher
Friedrich Schelling
(1775-1854) and introduced into English in 1816 by the poet and essayist
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834): “Still picturing that look askance, With forc’d unconscious sympathy Full before her father’s view.” Temporarily devoid of consciousness. The secondary meaning of the term—to be temporarily devoid of consciousness—made its first appearance in 1860 in the writing of
Oliver Wendell Holmes
: “A man is stunned by a blow with a stick on the head. He becomes unconscious.”
³

UNDER TOAD.
A form of intense anxiety, the chief feature of which is an overwhelming fear of the unknown in general and of one’s personal mortality in particular. This is American novelist
John Irving
’s term for fear of tragedy, coined in his 1976
The World According to Garp
. In the book, the youngest child, Walt, is constantly being warned to “watch out for the undertow” while playing in the surf, but he mishears the word as
Under Toad
: “Garp . . . realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.”

UNDERWORLD.
As used to describe the world of organized crime, this term was adopted to print by muckraker
Josiah Flynt
(1869–1910). According to William McKeen, professor and chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University, Flynt’s articles in the
Century
and
McClure’s
were so peppered with colorful expressions and his extensive use of argot, that Flynt has been cited as a force in loosening up the writing of journalists. An alcoholic and drug addict, Flynt is credited with having introduced such terms as “mob” (for organized crime), “squeal” (to inform on another), “speakeasy” (an illegal bar), “fix” (as in a bribe), “handout” (something given free), “pull” (for influence), “pinch” (for arrest), and “joint” (for an illegal establishment).
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