Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (19 page)

PATHOGRAPHY.
Term re-created by
American author
Joyce Carol Oates
for any biography dwelling on the negative aspects of the life of the person being written about.
*
She contrasted it to the traditional biography in a
New York Times
book review of August 28, 1988: “A pathography typically focuses upon a far smaller canvas, sets its standards much lower. Its motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”
In his book on style
Spunk and Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style,
Arthur Plotnik terms this coinage “that happy click when language perfectly fits the idea.”

PEDESTRIAN.
No one had an English word for someone who goes about on foot until 1791, when English Romantic poet
William Wordsworth
(1770–1850) coined the noun.

PERIPLUM.
Coined by American poet
Ezra Pound
(1885–1972) to describe a tour that takes you round, then back again.

PHEDINKUS.
A nonsense word created by American newspaperman and author
Damon Runyon
(1880–1946) in 1935. It has survived largely because of its appeal to other writers. In his 1951
I Break My Word
, Ivor Brown expressed his admiration for “the old phedinkus,” noting that it had a “Grecian savour.” In the introduction to
Guys and Dolls and Other Writings,
an anthology of Runyon’s writing, Pete Hamill wrote: “Nobody alive knows what a ‘phedinkus’ is, and Runyon’s stories are sprinkled with other words whose meanings have vanished into air. But their meanings can almost always be deciphered from context.”

PHILATELY.
This term for stamp collecting was coined by French stamp collector
Georges Herpin
in an 1864 article which appeared in the book
Le collectionneur de timbres-poste
(The collection of postage stamps). Herpin fashioned it from
phile-
(loving) and
ateleia
(exemption from tax). The tax reference dates to ancient Greek where the original function of postage stamps was to indicate that the cost of delivery had been prepaid by the sender. In H. W. Fowler’s original
Modern English Usage
it is suggested that
philately
be avoided in favor of stamp collecting and stamp collector, adding, “It is a pity that for one of the most popular scientific pursuits one of the least popularly intelligible names should have been found.”
²

PHYSICIST.
See
SCIENTIST
.

PICKSOME.
Given to picking and choosing; selective.
Ivor Brown
coined it in his 1948 work
No Idle Words
: “The former is fastidious, and to be thus selective, thus picksome, is surely a virtue.”

PLATONIC.
Describing a relationship that is intimate and affectionate but not sexual; spiritual rather than physical. The term originally was associated with Plato before English poet and playwright
Ben Jonson
(1572–1637) gave it new meaning in 1631.
³

PLENTIETH.
Franklin P. Adams
’s adjective of indefinite older age, as in: “He is about to celebrate his plentieth birthday.”

PLOBBY.
A word created by English humorist
P. G. Wodehouse
to describe the noise of a pig eating. He actually used it in conjunction with another word of his own invention to marvelous net effect: it was a “plobby, wofflesome sound.”

PLUTOGRAPHY.
Tom Wolfe
coined the term for the graphic depiction of the lives of the rich especially as a genre of popular literature, journalism, and broadcasting.
Money
magazine quoted Wolfe: “Social observer Tom Wolfe calls the 80’s the age of plutography, when a reverence for riches prevails.”

POCKETA-POCKETA.
James Thurber
’s imitative construction for the sound of an internal combustion engine. “The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa” is how he introduced the sound in the March 28, 1939, issue of the
New Yorker.

PODSNAPPERY.
The smugness of Mr. Podsnap in
Charles Dickens
’s
Our Mutual Friend
gave rise to this noun meaning a state of extreme self-satisfaction; a self-satisfied Philistine. Dickens is responsible for some of the most inventive character names in literature, including the Fezziwigs, the Jellybys, the Pardiggles, Chevy Slyme, Mrs. Spottletoe, Nicholas Tulrumble, and Wopsle. Dickens is the master of the
charactronym
—
the name of a literary character that is especially suited to his or her personality. Lexicographer Richard Lederer wrote: “The enormous and enduring popularity of Charles Dickens’s works springs in part from the writer’s skill at creating memorable charactronyms—Scrooge, the tightfisted miser; Mr. Gradgrind, the tyrannical schoolmaster; Jaggers, the rough-edged lawyer; and Miss Havisham (‘have a sham’), the jilted spinster who lives in an illusion.”

POLLYANNA.
To be naïvely cheerful and optimistic; unrealistically happy. From
the name of the fictional character created by
Eleanor Hodgman Porter
(1868–1920), American children’s author. It first appears in her 1913 work
Pollyanna:
“ ‘Her name is Pollyanna Whittier’  . . .  ‘And what are the special ingredients of this wonder-working—tonic of hers?’ . . .  ‘As near as I can find out it is an overwhelming, unquenchable gladness . . . Her quaint speeches are constantly being repeated to me, and, as near as I can make out, just being glad is the tenor of most of them.”
⁴

POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE.
Very prolific or fecund, a word coined by
T. S. Eliot
in 1919 and employed in a poem entitled “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.”

POOH STICKS.
A game in which sticks are thrown into a river from the upstream side of a bridge, the winner being the person whose stick emerges first on the other side. Created by
A. A. Milne
and introduced in 1928 in
The House at Pooh Corner.
The game has long been played by humans and even has a rule book,
The Official Pooh Corner Rules for Playing Poohsticks
, which was written in 1996 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the publication of
Winnie-the-Pooh.
The annual World Pooh Sticks Championship held at Day’s Lock, Little Wittenham, had to be canceled in 2013 because the river was too high.

POOSE.
Poet
Alastair Reid
’s word for a drop that hangs on the end of the nose and glistens. A poose is likely to appear when one has a cold or comes out of the water after swimming.

PORTMANTEAU WORD.
Term coined by
Lewis Carroll
for merging two existing words into one new word, e.g., his words
slithy
from
lithe
+
slimy
and
chortle
from
chuckle
+
snort.
In such blending, parts of two familiar words are yoked together (usually the first part of one word and the second part of the other) to produce a word that conveys the meanings and sound of the old ones—
smog
from
smoke
+
fog
,
motel
from
motor
+
hotel, heliport
from
helicopter
+
airport,
and
brunch
from
breakfast
+
lunch. Portmanteau
itself is a quaint word for
suitcase
, originally combining
porter
(to carry) and
manteau
(cloak) to make a name for a cloak-transporting suitcase designed for carrying on horseback. Lexicographer Ben Zimmer has noted that the portmanteau “remains perhaps the most popular method of new word formation in English, from slang (‘chillax,’ ‘geektastic’) to business jargon (‘webinar,’ ‘advertorial’).”
⁵

POSSLQ.
Acronym for either “person of opposite sex sharing living quarters or partner of opposite sex sharing living quarters”—in other words a person of the opposite sex living at the same address as another, specifically one who is a sexual partner but not a spouse. In early references this was reported as an official US Census Bureau demographic classification; but while it was never adopted by the government, it attained wide popular use. The term was coined by
Arthur J. Norton
, a member of the US Census Bureau, but given a great lift by radio commentator and broadcast poet
Charles Osgood
in his poem “My POSSLQ,” which opened with the stanza:

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will some new pleasures prove

Of golden sands and crystal brooks

With silken lines, and silver hooks.

There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do

If you would be my POSSLQ.
*

POSTMODERNISM.
The term
postmodern
was coined in the late 1940s by British historian
Arnold Toynbee
(1889–1975) in his monumental multivolume
A Study of History.
Toynbee was convinced that a new historical epoch had begun, in the post–World War I era with the emergence of “mass society,” where the normal working class played a more important role than the capitalist class. The term was redeployed in the mid-1970s by the American art critic and theorist Charles Jencks to describe contemporary antimodernist movements like pop art.
*

POWER ELITE.
American sociologist
C. Wright Mills
(1916–1962)
created the term
in a 1956 book of the same title to characterize a new coalition of three ruling groups that rose to dominance in the post–World War II United States that composed the power elite: the military, large corporations, and government leaders. He thought this concentration of power was progressively more centralized and undemocratic.
The Power Elite
was one of a series of books that came about within a few years of one another and leveled a critical eye at America. Each book had a title that entered the language as metaphor:
The Lonely Crowd
by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer described the changing and increasingly conformist and “other-directed” American character;
The Organization Man
by William H. Whyte looked at the corporate executive and the movement of business leadership from rugged individualism to collectivist thinking;
The Hidden Persuaders
by Vance Packard took a hard look at the pernicious effects of advertising; and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
a novel by Sloan Wilson, highlights the struggle to find purpose in a world of corporate conformity. Of the novel, columnist Bob Greene wrote in the
Chicago Tribune
in 1992: “The title of Sloan Wilson’s bestselling novel became part of the American vernacular—the book was a ground-breaking fictional look at conformity in the executive suite, and it was a piece of writing that helped the nation’s business community start to examine the effects of its perceived stodginess and sameness.”