Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (27 page)

The reality is that writers occasionally attempt to get a word into play but this is easier said than done. Take for example
Sabbath gasbags,
the term coined by American writer Calvin Trillin
to describe those who populate the Sunday morning television talk shows from Washington, DC. After coining the term, he embarked on a plan to systematically insinuate the phrase into the language. As he wrote of the crusade in the
New York Times
, “I first used it in a newspaper column. Then I used it in a book. Then I used it on television shows, gradually trying to drop modifiers like ‘the people I refer to as.’ Still nothing.”

Trillin’s futile quest may have had a whiff of satire about it, but it still underscored the point that it is difficult to get a word into the dictionary and doubly so if you work at it. The irony of this is that a quick check of the
OED
reveals that Trillin is listed as the first quote for two terms: the spicy
Buffalo chicken wing
(1980) and the adjective
wonky
(1978)—neither of which seem to be his. “First use” can be a bit tricky because it not only lists obvious coinages but also words that an author was the first to record—or at least the first that could be cited by the editors, which is certainly the case with Buffalo wings, a phenomenon Trillin was reporting on.

A few weeks before finishing my first draft of this book I checked with the latest online edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
to see if either of the neologisms that I claim—
word word
or
demonym
—were listed and they were not. I checked by searching the online version of the
OED
for words for which I was given credit for having first used.

Much to my surprise I was credited with being the first to use three different words: (1) a synonym for drunk (
arseholed
), which came from a list of drunk terms I had collected in a successful attempt to get into
The Guinness Book of World Records
for the most number of synonyms ever collected for a single concept—currently at 2,985; (2) a transitive verb fashioned from the name of a common instrument of dental hygiene for the act of using said instrument
(Waterpicked)
; and (3) an eponym for nuclear recklessness based on a character developed by Terry Southern for his novel and subsequent film
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(
Strangelovean
).

Although I would love to take credit for enriching the language, I did not create any of these three words and was nothing more than a carrier who took terms I had heard or read elsewhere and used them in print. I have made every effort in
Authorisms
to point out whether words were coined by writers or attributed to them for being the first to introduce borrowed words or popularize obscure ones.

I have not included in this collection the first use of the term
comfort food
(i.e., food that comforts or affords solace; hence, any food—often with a high sugar or carbohydrate content—that is associated with childhood or with home cooking). The phrase is attributed to food writer, crime novelist, and old friend Phyllis Richman who wrote in the
Washington Post
magazine of December 25, 1977: “Along with grits, one of the comfort foods of the South is black-eyed peas.” Richman did write the passage as the
Post
’s food editor but does not believe she invented the term. Rather she insists she picked it up elsewhere.

On the other hand Richman proudly claims to have coined
elechinondros,
a verbal wild card, which means it has no intrinsic meaning—but means anything and everything. Says Richman, “I just used it wherever it sounded good, in one exam or paper in most classes I had throughout high school and college. Nobody ever questioned it.”

The nonce word has not taken off, perhaps because Richman lacks the literary clout of, say, James Joyce to help her get it listed in the
OED
, which
includes at least a dozen nonce words from the writings of James Joyce. Despite the success of Joyce’s aforementioned
quark
, the problem with this class of words is that they have no legs (or in the case of those coined for poems, feet).
Smellsip
and
smilesmirk
are two nonce words from Joyce’s
Ulysses
—the former for smelling and sipping at once and the latter for smiling in a smirking matter—which are listed in the
OED
with the single example of their use in Joyce.

Attempts to elevate nonce words to common use, let alone
OED
status, commonly result in failure. In 1948, Max J. Herzberg, editor of
Word Study
, a publication of Merriam-Webster, wrote to a number of well-known writers to ask if they had created any new words. The results were fascinating and mixed—but all but a few were then and still are today nonce words. For example, novelist Sinclair Lewis, the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, replied to the request:

I’m the inventor of the following words—though you may decide that none of them have sufficiently caught on:

hobohemia

philanthrobber

and, though I’m not quite sure whether I invented it or stole it:

Kiplingo.

and one that I have never yet used but shall some day, re the American ethos:

teetotalitarian

Novelist Conrad Aiken pointed out that he had created and used the word
smubtle
in his 1927 book
Blue Voyage
on page 48 along with the noun
smubleties
. Aiken explains, “Its meaning of course is obvious enough: a combination of the smutty and the subtle.” Poet Louis Untermeyer had some rare coinages including
Peter Pantheism
for a hedonistic refusal to grow up, and
Debussybodies
for American musicians who were copying and prying into the French impressionistic style.
¹

The point of all of this being that even writers with large readerships have a tough time getting their clever nonce words accepted. On the other hand, Sinclair Lewis never intended to have the name of his most famous character and the title of his most famous novel turned into a word:
Babbitt.

Appendix: How Many Words and Phrases Did Shakespeare Actually Coin?

In 1997, while working as a consultant to the Merriam-Webster Co. of Springfield, Massachusetts, I helped to acquire and publish a book by Jeffrey McQuain and Stanley Malless entitled
Coined by Shakespeare—Words and Meanings First Penned by the Bard.
The book still reigns as the authority on Shakespearean coinage. Two lines in the introduction to the book fascinated me then as they do today: “How many words has Shakespeare added to English? Guesses have ranged from a few hundred terms to more than 10,000 with the most likely estimate approximately 1,700 words.”
¹

Since that book was published in 1998, a number of new estimates have come into play that are in dazzling disagreement, including these three that appeared in print between 2006 and 2007 and are listed from high bid to low:

“He coined nearly six thousand new words.” —Seth Lerer,
Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language
²

“He coined . . . 2,035 words.” —Bill Bryson,
Shakespeare: The World as Stage
³

“His writing not only shows the richness the language had already achieved but also shows Shakespeare to have been a prolific word coiner.
Besmirch, impede, rant,
and
wild-goose chase
are a few of the more than 1,000 words and phrases that he evidently added to our language.” —Barbara Wallraff,
American Scholar,
Spring 2006
⁴

The World Wide Web was a wispy little toy in 1998 (the year Google came into play on September 27), but since then it has became a place where Shakespeare’s name produces 87.3 million hits and where there are scores of websites devoted to honoring, examining, or dismissing him. With this has come a host of new e-estimates, all pulled from sites in late 2013:

Mental Floss asserts that there are “over 2200 never-before-seen words” in Shakespeare’s scripts and poems.

A website entitled
No Sweat Shakespeare
claims that “in all of his work—the plays, the sonnets and the narrative poems—Shakespeare uses 17,677 words: Of those words, Shakespeare invented an incredible 1,700 of them!”
⁵

The list goes on with McQuain and Malless’s estimate of 1,700 words being the most common: Words Shakespeare Invented—Shakespeare Online, by Amanda Mabillard, and
Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard
by Ben Crystal.

So do we give credit to Shakespeare for way more than he deserves? Probably, especially if one looks at the math. Shakespeare’s vocabulary was something on the order of 15,000 words and the only dictionary of the English language at the time of Shakespeare’s death contained a mere 5,080 words.
⁶

The first question that must be asked is how many of these words were simply words in common use but not recorded until Shakespeare’s plays were published, such as the term
garden house,
which means house in the garden or summer house, or the word
leapfrog,
which is on just about everyone’s list of Bardicisms. Near the end of
Henry V,
King Henry pledges his love to Princess Katherine of France. The king alludes to his physical dexterity by saying that “if I could win a lady at leap-frog . . . I should quickly leap into a wife,” act 5, scene 2, lines 136–39. Is it not possible—or probable—that leapfrog was a common game of Shakespeare’s childhood known by that name to his audience, but not yet published in English literature? If this game in which players vault over each other’s stooped backs was not known to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre audience, the line and the scene would have made no sense.

Also, if Shakespeare’s neologisms had been in the thousands as some have claimed, wouldn’t that have been a barrier between Shakespeare and his audience—akin to staging a play today with words from Klingon or Esperanto tossed in to the dialogue?

It seems safe to conclude that Shakespeare created or introduced many less than a thousand words and phrases still in common use. This is in line with the list of words created by Shakespeare by American author and professor of biochemistry Michael Macrone’s national bestseller,
Brush Up Your Shakespeare!
first published in 1990 and later expanded in 2000. Macrone is the only modern writer to actually compile a list and work to refine it over time. His most recent version of the list appeared in 2003 in the
Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter,
in which 501 words and phrases are listed.
⁷