Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (6 page)

BOXER.
A prizefighter; a pugilist. A term that makes its debut in English novelist
Henry Fielding
’s
(1707–1754)
Joseph Andrews
in 1742: “A stout Fellow, and an expert Boxer.”

BRAINWASHING.
A forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas. The term created by American journalist, author, and intelligence agent
Edward Hunter
(1902–1978) first appeared in a dispatch that he wrote for the
Miami Daily News
on September 24, 1950. It was used again by him in other dispatches and his 1951 book
Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds
.
The term replaced earlier terms like
mind control
and
menticide,
and must be regarded as one of the more successful coinages of the post–World War II era. A 2013 Google search yielded more than 5.5 million hits.
¹⁶

BRAVE NEW WORLD.
A phrase that originated in
Shakespeare
’s
The Tempest,
act 5, scene 1, as part of a speech by Miranda:

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in’t.

It became the title for
Aldous Huxley
’s (1894–1963) dystopia, which was published in 1932 and depicted a soulless world of totalitarian cultural control in which, for instance, the works of William Shakespeare are banned.
Brave new world
has become a catchphrase for any social or technological change that is reminiscent of the world depicted by Huxley in his novel, i.e., a world that is regimented, soulless, and sterile—a true dystopia. When Huxley’s work was paired with George Orwell’s
1984
and Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon,
the books formed a trilogy of cautionary tales for mid-twentieth-century readers.

BRICK.
None other than English novelist
William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811–1863) created this term for a merry citizen with many friends but little social standing; a jolly good citizen content in his or her mediocrity. He first employed it in the sentence: “He’s a dear little brick.”

BRILLIG.
Four o’clock in the afternoon: a time according to English writer
Lewis Carroll
(1832–1898) when you begin broiling things for dinner.

BROBDINGNAGIAN.
That which is huge, gigantic, vastly oversized. It comes from
Jonathan Swift
’s 1726 satire
Gulliver’s Travels
in which Brobdingnag was a country of giants, twelve times the size of normal humans.

BROMIDE AND SULPHIDE.
Words coined by
Gelett Burgess
in his humorous 1906 essay
Are You a Bromide?
The Sulphitic Theory Expounded and Exemplified
, which explains “the terms ‘bromide’ and ‘sulphite’ as applied to psychological rather than chemical analysis.” The
bromide
, according to Burgess, “does his thinking by syndicate. He follows the main-traveled roads, he goes with the crowd.” The
sulphite
, on the other hand, is unconventional, original, everything that the bromide is not.

BROMIDIC.
That which is common or conventional. Burgess stated in
Are You a Bromide?
that
“
the Bromide can’t possibly help being bromidic.”

BROUHAHA.
An uproar, a to-do. From the French but blended into English in 1890 by
Oliver Wendell Holmes
in
Over the Teacups
: “I enjoy the
brouhaha . . .
of
all this quarrelsome menagerie of noise-making machines.”

BUNBURY.
An imaginary person used as a bogus excuse for visiting a place or avoiding work, it has become a fictional eponym for a spurious alibi. The Irish writer and poet
Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) wrote in
The
Importance of Being Earnest,
“I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.” Before the book is finished he has extended Bunbury’s reach to other parts of speech. “Now that I know you to be a confirmed Bunburyist I naturally want to talk to you about Bunburying.”

BUTTERFINGERS.
Charles Dickens
used the term in his 1836
The Pickwick Papers
(more properly called
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
): “At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as ‘Ah, ah!—stupid’—‘Now, butter-fingers’—‘Muff’— ‘Humbug’—and so forth.”

BUTTINSKY.
Faux eponym for person who interrupts, who butts in.
Created by
American author
George Ade
,
who wrote some of his stories in slang.
His 1902
The
Girl Proposition
says, “The Friend belonged to the Buttinsky Family and refused to stay on the Far Side of the Room.”

*
Paul McFedries, who maintains the Word Spy website and has written the book
Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to New Words,
notes that
blurb
is “a relatively rare example of a slang term that makes the leap into mainstream use.” He adds, “I’m on a personal mission to keep another of Mr. Burgess’ coinages afloat:
tintiddle,
‘a witty retort, thought of too late.’ Please do me a huge personal favor and slip this word into a conversation or two this weekend.”

C

CALIFORNIA.
Coined in 1510 by the Spanish novelist
Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo
in the book
Las Sergas de Esplandián
, in which the name was applied to an imaginary island where there was an abundance of precious stones, gold, and women. “Know that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.”

CALYPSO.
The term is certainly older in its indigenous culture but it was
Aldous Huxley
who according to the
OED
imported it to a literary context in 1934. “The tunes to which these songs are sung is always some variant of an old Spanish air called Calypso; the words are home-made and topical.”
¹

CATBIRD SEAT.
A position of control and mastery, often stated as “sitting in the catbird seat.” The term was popularized in the 1940s by American baseball broadcaster and journalist
Red Barber
(1908–1992), who would use it, for example, to describe a batter with a count of three balls and no strikes, or a pitcher with a big lead. The term has long been attributed to Barber: even though he denied having created it, he explained how he once “bought” it. In his 1968 biography
Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat
, Barber tells the story of playing penny ante poker in Cincinnati with friends, and sitting for hours unable to win a hand. Then he related, “Finally, during a round of seven-card stud, I decided I was going to force the issue. I raised on the first bet, and I raised again on every card. At the end, when the showdown came, it was between a fellow named Frank Cope and me. Frank turned over his hole cards, showed a pair of aces, and won the pot. He said, ‘Thank you, Red. I had those aces from the start. I was sitting in the catbird seat.’ I didn’t have to be told the meaning. And I had paid for it. It was mine.”

CATCH-22.
The working title for Joseph Heller’s (1923–1999) modern classic novel about the mindlessness of war was
Catch-18
, a reference to a military regulation that keeps the pilots in the story flying one suicidal mission after another. The only way to be excused from flying such missions is to be declared insane, but asking to be excused for the reason of insanity is proof of a rational mind and bars being excused. Shortly before the appearance of the book in 1961, Leon Uris’s bestselling novel
Mila 18
was published. To avoid numerical confusion, Heller and his editor decided to change
Catch-18
to
Catch-22.
The choice turned out to be both fortunate and fortuitous as the
22
more rhythmically and symbolically captures the double duplicity of both the military regulation itself and the bizarre world that Heller shapes in the novel. (“‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22,’” observes Yossarian. ‘It’s the best there is,’ Doc Daneeka agrees.”) During the more than half century since its literary birth,
catch-22
, generally lowercased, has come to mean any predicament in which we are caught coming and going, and in which the very nature of the problem denies and defies its solution. So succinctly does
catch-22
embody the push-me-pull-you absurdity of modern life that the word has become the most frequently employed and deeply embedded allusion from all of American literature often by those with no idea where the term came from.

CELL.
The structural, functional, and biological unit of all organisms. English naturalist Robert Hooke (1635–1703) coined the term
cell
after viewing slices of cork through a microscope. The term came from the Latin word
cella,
which means “storeroom” or “small container.” He documented his work in the
Micrographia,
written in 1665.