Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (25 page)

UNPERSON.
An individual who for political or social reasons is deemed not to have existed and whose name is removed from all public records. By extension, one whose existence or achievement is officially denied or disregarded; a person of no political or social importance. Introduced by
George Orwell
in 1949 in
1984
: “Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson.” In American politics, losing candidates often are branded with this label within days of their loss. “Mitt Romney,” wrote Michael Hirsh in the
National Journal
of February 14, 2013, “the late lamented presidential candidate (in case you forgot who he was), has quickly become an unperson in a Republican Party that never much wanted him as its champion in the first place.”

UNPUTDOWNABLE.
The word that supplanted
unlaydownable
after
Raymond Chandler
(1888–1959)
said of a book in
1947,
“
I found it absolutely . . . unputdownable.”
⁶

UNLAYDOWNABLE.
Coinage in the mid-1930s of
Franklin P. Adams
, who maintained that he had found a book of that nature. The term later yielded in popularity to
unputdownable
.
⁵

URBANALITY.
James Thurber
’s term for self-conscious and plodding urbanity. He used it to describe, among other things, the early issues of the
New Yorker
.

UTOPIA.
The English statesman and author
Sir Thomas More
invented the word
utopia
in his book of the same name, published in 1516. He coined the word from three Greek elements
topos
(place),
eu
(good), and
ou
(no). The idea behind the Greek double meaning was that a utopia was an ideal, perfect place—but that such a place could never exist. According to the
OED
, the antonym
dystopia
is
an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible. It appears in 1952 in a book called
The Quest for Utopia
by Glenn Robert Negley and John Max Patrick, introduced in this sentence: “The
Mundus Alter et Idem
[of Joseph Hall] is . . . the opposite of
utopia
, the ideal society: it is a
dystopia
, if it is permissible to coin a word.” The neologism was applied to such works as George Orwell’s
1984
and Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World.

UTOPIATE.
Blend of
utopia
and
opiate
to describe a drug—e.g., LSD—which produces fantasies of a utopian existence; a total escape from reality. Coined by
Richard Hosmer Blum
of Stanford University in 1964 for the title and subject of his book
Utopiates: The Use and Users of LSD 25
: “The movement promises much—a return to paradise, a Utopia of the inner life—and so LSD-25 becomes, if one may be allowed a neologism, a ‘Utopiate.’ ”

V

VAGULATE.
To wander in a vague manner; to waver. This
Virginia Woolf
creation is so rare that all three citations in the
OED
for it are from Woolf’s writing.
¹

VAGULOUS.
Wayward, vague, wavering. This word was also coined by
Virginia Woolf
.

VERBICIDE.
British novelist and critic
C. S. Lewis
’s
term for the killing of a word or the willful distortion or depreciation of its original meaning. Verbicide is discussed at length in Lewis’s
Studies in Words
, making such assertions about the act as this: “But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative—useless synonyms for
good
or for
bad
.”

VERBIVORE.
This neologism first appears in the title of American author and teacher
Richard Lederer
’s 1994 book
Adventures of a Verbivore
. He defined the term: “Carnivores eat flesh and meat; piscivores eat fish; herbivores consume plants and vegetables; verbivores devour words. I am such a creature. My whole life I have feasted on words—ogled their appetizing shapes, colors, and textures; swished them around in my mouth; lingered over their many tastes; felt their juices run down my chin. During my adventures as a fly-by-the-roof-of-the-mouth, user-friendly wizard of idiom, I have met thousands of other wordaholics, logolepts, and verbivores, folks who also eat their words.”
²

VIDEOT.
American sportswriter
Red Smith
’s
(1905–1982) word for those who watch anything that flickers across the television screen.

VISIBILIA.
That which can be seen. A 1936 coinage of
C. S. Lewis
:
“On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia
to express them.”
³

VOMITY.
Suggesting vomit. The word made its debut in
J. D. Salinger
’s 1951
The Catcher in the Rye,
in which the main character Holden Caulfield observes: “The cab I had was a real old one that smelled like someone’d just tossed his cookies in it. I always get those vomity kind of cabs if I go anywhere late at night.”

W

WACK.
A crazy person. The term made its literary debut in
Ellery Queen
’s
The Four of Hearts:
“All you wacks act this way at first. Them that can take it snaps out of it.” Queen is both the fictional hero of the Ellery Queen mysteries as well as the author—the pseudonym for two cousins from Brooklyn, New York, named Daniel Nathan (1905–1982) and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky (1905–1971). They also published books under the names
Frederic Dannay
and
Manfred Bennington Lee
respectively.

WALTER MITTY.
Eponym for any ordinary, timid person who indulges in daydreams involving great adventures and heroic feats. After the title character in
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
, the 1939 short story by
James Thurber
was made into a movie of the same name. Thurber’s story appeared in the March 18, 1939, issue of the
New Yorker
magazine. In the story, Walter Mitty is a meek husband, rather uxorious, who fantasizes great exploits to escape the humdrum of daily life. One minute he is dreaming of being a heroic pilot (“Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500!”); the next minute he becomes a daring naval commander. In his next thought he transforms into a master surgeon, and even a cold-blooded killer.

WAR PAINT.
Pigments applied to the face or body in preparation for battle, as in certain tribal societies; and by extension, the cosmetics such as lipstick, rouge, or mascara applied before social situations. Introduced by
James Fenimore Cooper
in
The Last of the Mohicans
: “The young Huron was in his war-paint.”
Cooper may well have invented the term
.
¹

WARS OF THE ROSES.
What we now call the civil wars fought mainly in England and Wales between 1455 and 1485 and were sometimes referred to by contemporaries as the “Cousins’ Wars.”  The
War of the Roses
was coined by
Sir Walter Scott
in his novel
Anne of Geierstein
, published in 1829.

WASP.
Acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant made popular by University of Pennsylvania sociologist
E. Digby Baltzell
(1915–1996) and used to define an entire ethnicity of which he was a member. According to his
New York Times
obituary: “Repeatedly, Dr. Baltzell has been said to have invented the acronym. But Mrs. Baltzell said in an interview yesterday that he had not originated it. She said that it might never be known who first used it, but that Dr. Baltzell ‘explicated and defined it in his writings.’” Baltzell certainly made it better known, particularly in his book
The
Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America.
²

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.
The
Times of London
was the first to use this term in 1937
referring to aerial bombing campaigns of the Spanish Civil War of that year, and in particular, the German attack on the Spanish city of Guernica.

WENDY.
J.
M. Barrie
(1860–1937) popularized this name for the heroine of his play
Peter Pan
.
Earlier the name had been extremely rare and used as a boy’s name.

WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE.
Coined by
Shakespeare.
As used in
The Tempest
this expression means that history influences and sets the context for the present. It is emblazoned on the National Archives building in Washington and used by some to characterize the future of the Department of State and the conduct of American foreign relations.
³

WHITE-COLLAR.
A worker engaged in nonmanual work who usually works in an office. Introduced by
Upton Sinclair
(1878–1968) in 1919 in
The Brass Check:
“It is a fact with which every union workingman is familiar that his most bitter despisers are the petty underlings of the business world, the poor office-clerks . . . who, because they are allowed to wear a white collar . . . regard themselves as members of the capitalist class.” The term
blue-collar
did not come into play for another decade. The first use in the
OED
is 1929 when the two collars are linked in a bulletin reporting on labor conditions: “No economic subject probably is discussed more frequently than the ‘wage question’ . . . This holds for all groups, white collar and blue collar.”
⁴