Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (5 page)

BIBLIOBIBULI.
Term coined by
H. L. Mencken
to describe those who are “drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion.”

BIG BROTHER.
British author
George Orwell
’s (1903–1950) term for an omnipresent government that relied on covert operations to monitor and modify the behavior of its citizens: “Big Brother is watching you.” (One of George Orwell’s six rules of good writing was never to use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.)

BILLIONAIRE.
The possessor of property worth a billion or more dollars. Coined by
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
(1809-1894) in his 1861 novel
Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny
: “One would like to give a party now and then, if one could be a billionaire.”

BIOGRAPHY.
Restoration poet and critic
John Dryden
(1631–1700)
coined this word in the preface to his translation of Plutarch in which he defined it as “the history of particular men’s lives.”

BIOPHILIA.
Name of 1984 book by American biologist
E. O. Wilson
in which the term is created and defined as the “innate human urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”

BIRTH CONTROL.
Term created by
Margaret Sanger
(1879–1966), who founded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and was in the forefront of the fight for women’s reproductive rights. The term first appeared in her socialist-feminist periodical the
Woman Rebel
in 1914. In the same year Sanger wrote and published a pamphlet on methods of contraception,
Family Limitation
, which was based on her research on techniques and technologies available around the world.
¹¹

BITCH GODDESS.
Success as seen through the prism of its negative consequences; any destructive obsession. Creation of pioneering American psychologist
William James
(1842–1910), who wrote in 1906: “A symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success.”
D. H. Lawrence
(1895–1930) used the term to fine effect in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
“He realized now that the
bitch
-
goddess
of success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her, but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and bones.”
¹²
 

BLABBERMOUTH.
First used by
John Steinbeck
in his 1936 novel
In Dubious Battle
: “One minute he’s a blabber-mouth kid.”

BLACK HOLE.
An invisible object in outer space formed when a massive star collapses from its own gravity. A black hole has such a strong pull of gravity—within a certain distance of it—nothing can escape, not even light. Coined by
John A. Wheeler
(1911–2008) at a conference in New York in 1967, Dr. Wheeler, seizing on a suggestion shouted from the audience, hit on the name
black hole
to dramatize this dire possibility for a star and for physics. The black hole ‘’teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but,’’ he wrote in his 1999 autobiography,
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics

BLACK POWER.
Created by African American writer
Richard Wright
(1908–1960) as the title for his 1954 book on Africa’s Gold Coast and its enormous potential. The term was adopted as a slogan for a broader movement in support of civil rights and political power for black people. The movement was especially prominent in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and closely associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Wright’s books tended to have strong, memorable titles—
Uncle Tom’s Children
,
Black Boy,
and
Native Son.

BLADDERCLOCK.
The use of one’s bladder as an alarm clock; drinking the right amount of water the night before to get up at a specified time in the morning. Coinage of
Bill Sherk
, author of
Brave New Words
, a brilliant collection of fresh mintings from Canada.

BLATANT.
The word first appeared in 1596, as part of poet
Edmund Spenser
’s (1552–1599) poem “The Faerie Queene.” The invented word describes a horrible monster known as the Blatant Beast, which is why the word’s first definition is “noisy and particularly vulgar.” The Blatant Beast as it appears in the poem is “a dreadful fiend of gods and men, ydrad”; the type of calumny or slander. He was begotten of Cerberus and Chimera, and has a hundred tongues and a sting; with his tongues he speaks things “most shameful, most unrighteous, most untrue,” and with his sting “steeps them in poison.” Sir Artegal pursues him and Sir Calidore muzzles the monster, and draws him with a chain to Faerie Land. The beast breaks his chain and regains his liberty. Having coined the word
blatant
, Spenser never uses it except as a modifier for his monster. It is probably derived from the provincial word
blate
, meaning to bellow or roar.
¹³

BLUE-COLLAR.
See
WHITE-COLLAR
.

BLURB.
A brief descriptive paragraph or note of the contents or character of a book, printed as a commendatory advertisement on the wrapper, or jacket, of a newly published work. The word was coined in 1907 by American author and humorist
Gelett Burgess
(1866–1951),
who employed a book jacket embellished with a drawing of a pulchritudinous young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Belinda Blurb. It was later given a full definition in his 1914 comic dictionary
Burgess Unabridged
:

Blurb
, 1. A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher . . . On the “jacket” of the “latest” fiction, we find the blurb; abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the “sensation of the year.”

The term gained such immediate acceptance that all friendly endorsements became known as blurbs. In the early 1950s there was a move to replace the term with the euphonious
jacketism
(alluding to the dust jacket of a book), but it was an ill-fated move.
*

B
OBOS.
American journalist
David Brooks
’s compressing of “bourgeois bohemians” used to describe former social rebels who are now well-heeled and self-indulgent and featured in his 2000 book
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
. Brooks explained the gist of the term and the book as his discovery of an “America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn’t just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people’s attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man.”

BOOBOISIE.
A segment of the general public composed of uneducated, uncultured persons. It is a blend of
boob
+
bourgeoisie
,
coined by
H. L. Mencken
in 1922.
An individual American who was not too bright was termed
Boobus Americanus
by Mencken, the reporter, editor, columnist, and author of many books including
The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States.

BOOM.
As a verb meaning to burst into prosperity or suddenly rise in popularity, this term was introduced by
Joseph B. McCullagh
(?–1896), a St. Louis newspaper editor, in July 1878: “The fact is, the Grant movement for a third term of the presidency, is booming.” When he was later asked to explain the word, McCullagh replied, “I cannot recall how I came to use it except that, while on the gunboats of the Mississippi River during the war I heard pilots say of the river when rising rapidly and overflowing its banks, that it was ‘booming.’ The idea I wished to convey was that the Grant movement was rising—swelling. The word seemed to be a good one to the ear, and I kept it up. The word was generally adopted about a year afterward. I used it as a noun, after a while and spoke of  ‘the Grant boom.’  ”
¹⁴

BOREDOM.
One could be a bore before 1852, but this word for tedium did not enter the English language until 1852, when
Charles Dickens
used it six times in his ninth novel,
Bleak House.
The French word
ennui
was in full play when Dickens coined
boredom
. The first citation for ennui in the
OED
is a quote from 1661 that decries the fact English did not have words that fully expressed the French words
naiveté
,
bizarre
, and
ennui
.
¹⁵

BOSWELL.
Eponym for a companion who witnesses and records what another person does. The term alludes to the relationship between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, whose life Boswell recorded.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
coined the term in his 1858 work
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
when he wrote: “Every man his own Boswell.” A key adopter of the term was Arthur Conan Doyle, who, in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, has Holmes say to his assistant Watson: “Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.”