Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (7 page)

CHAPLINESQUE.
Resembling the comic physical style of actor
Sir
Charles Spencer
, known as
Charlie Chaplin
(1889–1977) and renowned for his portrayal of a downtrodden little man with baggy trousers, bowler hat, and cane. Irish playwright
George Bernard Shaw
turned the comedian’s name into an adjective
in 1921 and Hart Crane used it for the name of one his most famous poems in 1933.
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CHEESECAKE.
Appeared in
Time
magazine on September 17, 1934: “Tabloid and Heartsmen go after ‘cheesecake’—leg-pictures of sporty females.”

CHICKADEE.
Common name for the black-cap chickadee, a bird common to North America and in the same group as the titmouse. The name appears to have been coined by American author
Henry David Thoreau
(1817–1862)
who used it as early as 1839. It appears in
Walden
in 1854: “The chickadee lisps amid the evergreens.”

CHINTZY.
Originally this word meant to be decorated or covered with chintz, a calico print from India, or suggestive of a pattern in chintz. It was extended to mean unfashionable, cheap, or stingy, coming from none other than Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name
George Eliot
(1819–1880) who wrote in a letter in 1851: “The effect is chintzy and would be unbecoming.”
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CHORTLE.
Blend of
chuckle + snort
created by
Lewis Carroll
in
Through the Looking-Glass:
“‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy.”

CHUG-A-LUG.
This onomatopoeic exhortation to hastily consume beer also represents, in the words of the
OED
, “a glugging, chugging, or gobbling sound, esp. that of a person consuming a drink in large gulps.” The term was introduced, again according to the
OED,
in 1903 by the American Western adventure novelist
Zane Grey
(1872–1939) in the book
Betty Zane:
“Presently the silence was groken [
sic
] by a long, shrill, peculiar cry. ‘Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug-chug.’ ‘Well, it’s a turkey, all right,’ . . . remarked Colonel Zane.”

CO-ED.
Short for coeducation—any coeducational institution or system.
Louisa May Alcott
(1832–1888) wrote in
Jo’s Boys:
“Never liked
co
-
ed.
” The line is uttered by a boy named Adolphus “Dolly” Pettingill, who objected to eating with girls.

COINED THE WORD/COINED THE PHRASE.
The notion of coining words in the manner of minting coins seems to have started with Elizabethan writer
George Puttenham
(1529–1590)
in 1589 in
The Arte of English Poesie
in which he complains of “young schollers not halfe well studied” who “seeme to coigne fine wordes out of the Latin.” In French a
coigne
is a die used to stamp money. Shakespeare, the greatest coiner of them all, also referred to the coining of language in
Coriolanus
, 1607: “So shall my Lungs Coine words till their decay.”

C
OJONES.
Testicles in the allegorical sense, representing courage and tenacity. Imported from Spanish by
Ernest Hemingway
(1899–1961) in his 1932 nonfiction bullfighting opus
Death in the Afternoon:
“It takes more cojones,” he wrote, “to be a sportsman where death is a closer party to the game.”

COLD WAR.
In terms of the specific ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, the term was first used by
Herbert Bayard Swope
(1882–1958) of the
New York World
in speeches he wrote for financier and industrialist
Bernard Baruch
(1870–1965). Baruch said in a speech in South Carolina on April 16, 1947: “Let us not be deceived—today we are in the midst of a cold war.” Afterward, Swope noted that the press picked up the phrase and it soon became a part of everyday speech. However, using the term to describe an indirect conflict, the
Oxford English Dictionary
credits
George Orwell
in 1945 describing “a state which was in a permanent ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.”

COMSTOCKERY.
Strict censorship of materials considered obscene. Named for Anthony Comstock,
a United States postal inspector and politician who was dedicated to ideas of Victorian morality. The term was coined by
George Bernard Shaw
in 1905 after Comstock had alerted the New York police as to the content of Shaw’s play
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
. Shaw remarked in a bylined piece in the
New York Times
of September 26, 1905, that “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.” Comstock thought of Shaw as an “Irish smut dealer.”

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION.
Spending for the sake of show, a concept introduced and so labeled by
Thorstein Veblen
(1857–1929) in his 1899
Theory of the Leisure Class
in which he wrote: “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.” Less recalled today, Veblen also described the end product of conspicuous consumption: “The need of conspicuous waste . . . stands ready to absorb any increase in the community’s industrial efficiency or output of goods.”

COTTON WOOLIES.
British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot, screenwriter, and children’s book
author
Roald Dahl
(1916–1990) created this generic term for what modern children are not interested in reading about. He used the term in an interview that appeared in an article about his writing in the
Hartford Courant:
“I write of nasty things and violent happenings because kids are themselves that way . . . Kids are too tough to read about little cotton woolies.”

COUNTERCULTURE.
American author,
scholar, and critic
Theodore Roszak
(1933–2011) created this term for the social upheavals of the 1960s into the mainstream in his work
The Making of a Counter Culture
. The book was published in 1969, three weeks after the Woodstock Festival, which was then and still is emblematic of Roszak’s label.

CROWDSOURCING.
Term created by
Wired
magazine writer
Jeff Howe
and editor
Mark Robinson
that initially referred to when a company outsourced a job using a group of people (usually volunteers or people who receive a small compensation) gathered through an open call on the Internet to tap into an enthusiastic knowledge base that can—under ideal conditions—even outperform experienced professionals.
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CRYPTEX.
A word created by novelist
Dan Brown
in
The Da Vinci Code
to describe a portable vault concealing the secret location of the legendary Holy Grail.

CUPERTINO EFFECT.
Term that describes what happens when a computer automatically “corrects” your spelling into something wrong or incomprehensible. The name originates from an early spellchecking program’s habit of automatically correcting the word “cooperation” (when spelled without a hyphen) into “Cupertino,” the name of the California city in which Apple has its headquarters. The term was created by Tom Chatfield, author of
Netymology: From Apps to Zombies—A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World.
Chatfield discussed the effect in the April 1, 2013, issue of the online
BBC News Magazine
where he wrote: “One of my favorite Cupertinos was my first computer’s habit of changing the name ‘Freud’ into ‘fraud’—or, more recently, of one phone’s fondness for converting ‘soonish’ into ‘Zionism.’”
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CYBERIAN.
Demonym for an inhabitant of cyberspace or Cyberia, a term invented by
Howard Rheingold
in 1991 in his book
Virtual Reality: Exploring the Brave New Technologies of Artificial Experience and Interactive Worlds—From Cyberspace to Teledildonics.
“I’ve heard the cyberians at one VR software vendor refer to the head-mounted display . . . as ‘the face-sucker.’”

CYBERSPACE.
Novelist
William Gibson
invented this word in a 1982 short story, but it became popular after the publication of his sci-fi novel
Neuromancer
in 1984. He described cyberspace as “a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.” In 1996 Gibson wrote an essay that appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
in which he said, “I coined the word
cyberspace
in 1991 in one of my first science fiction stories and subsequently used it to describe something that people insist on seeing as sort of a literary forerunner of the Internet. This being so, some think it remarkable that I do not use E-mail.” He did admit to being an avid browser of the World Wide Web.
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D

DADDYKNOWSBESTISM.
Coined by American newspaper columnists
Joseph Alsop
and
Stewart Alsop
in an article criticizing the American government for telling the American people less than one-tenth of what they ought to know about the atomic bomb.
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