Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (20 page)

PROSUMER.
Futurist
Alvin Toffler
coined
prosumer
in his classic 1980 work
The Third Wave.
Toffler’s prosumer combined
producer
and
consumer
and referred to individuals who design the products they purchase. More recently, however, prosumer has been given a second meaning as a portmanteau of
professional
and
consumer
, indicating people who are amateurs in a given field but covet professional-grade equipment such as industrial-grade kitchen equipment and garden machinery.

PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC.
First coined by sociologist
Max Weber
(1864–1920) in 1904, who saw work as a duty that benefits both the individual and society as a whole. Also, work that is generally good for physical and mental health and has a positive impact on an individual’s well-being.

PSYCHOBABBLE.
Psychological jargon
regarded as
meaningless. A term
created by
Richard D. Rosen
, novelist who first used it in a 1975 article in the
Boston Phoenix
: “We are living, practically no one has to be reminded, in a therapeutic age. The sign in every storefront reads: ‘Psychobabble spoken here.’ ” Rosen is also credited with hatching the term
psychobabbler
for one who uses the jargon. The suffix
-babble
is used for the most negative and obfuscatory aspects of jargon. Babble itself started life in the fourteenth century to describe the gurgles and vocables of infants. See also
TECHNOBABBLE.

PUGILIST.
A practitioner of the art of boxing; a boxer, a fighter. This is one of the many words debuted by
Pierce Egan
(1772–1849), the man who can be regarded as the first beat sports reporter and the first to apply slang (some of his own making) to the low sports—boxing, cockfighting, bullbaiting.
⁶

PUNDUSTRY.
The pundit industry. The term was coined by columnist
Gene Weingarten
in his cover story for the
Washington Post
magazine for March 23, 2008, entitled “Cruel and Unusual Punishment,”
an allusion to the fact that he forced himself to watch five televisions simultaneously, each containing a different political pundit opining on the same subject. The
pundustry
as Weingarten saw it: “There are too many voices, competing too hard, fighting for attention, ranting, redundant, random. The dissemination of fact and opinion is no longer the sole province of people and institutions with the money to buy network monopolies or ink by the ton, as it was a half-century ago when information was delivered to us, for better or worse, like the latest 1950s-era cigarette: filtered, for an illusion of safety. Now, all is out of control. Everyone with a computer is a potential pundit; anyone with a video camera can be on a screen.”

PUSHMI-PULLYU.
An imaginary creature resembling a llama or antelope, but with a head at either end of the body, pointing away from the torso, so that the creature always faces in two directions at once. It was created in 1922 by British children’s author
Hugh Lofting
(1886–1947) for his book
Doctor Dolittle,
in which he noted that “pushmi-pullyus are now extinct . . . They had no tail, but a head at each end, and sharp horns on each head . . . Only one half of him slept at a time. The other head was always awake—and watching.” The name of the beast is often invoked to describe policies, e.g., “The constitutional division of war powers is not intended to produce a pushmi-pullyu, with two minds to make up.”
⁷

*
The word was coined earlier for the biography of an illness—a true pathology. Oates never claimed to have coined the word—just that she gave it a secondary meaning.

*
The first line of this poem is taken from the first line of John Donne’s “The Bait
.
”

*
For the author this is one of those terms that provide more heat than light and that he suspects is a major trigger of migraine headaches among other nonacademics along with deconstructuralism, poststructuralism, and existentialism.

Q

QUARK.
A word that first appears in
James Joyce
’s
Finnegans Wake
in the nonce phrase “Three Quarks for Muster Mark” but that was reapplied as the name for any of a group of elementary particles supposed to be the fundamental units that combine to make up the subatomic particles known as hadrons. Scientist Murray Gell-Mann had been thinking about calling the unit “kwork,” but when he found the invented word in the Joyce classic, he knew he had discovered the spelling he wanted to use. Here’s what he had to say about it: “In 1963, when I assigned the name ‘quark’ to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been ‘kwork.’  Then, in one of my occasional perusals of
Finnegans Wake
, by James Joyce, I came across the word ‘quark.’”
¹

QUATRESSENTIAL.
Not quite quintessential. One of a number of new words that American writer
Lewis Burke Frumkes
has offered the English language via his article, “A Volley of Words,” in
Harper’s
magazine. Two other examples of Frumkes’s fine work:
copulescence
, the healthy afterglow that attends successful sexual intercourse;
ossis
, the contents of a black hole.

QUIDDITCH.
An imaginary game in which players fly on broomsticks. The game is played in
J. K. Rowling
’s Harry Potter novels. The term was added to the sixth edition of the
Collins English Dictionary
because its editor said it is an example of a word created for fiction but is understood even by those who have not read the books or seen the films

QUIXOTIC.
Exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical. Eponym based on Don Quixote, the name of the hero of the satirical romance by
Miguel de Cervantes
(1547–1616), published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. The term made its debut in the writing of British satirist and political writer
Nicholas Amhurst
(1697–1742) in the lines: “Pulpit and Press fictitious Ills engage, And combat Windmills with
Quixotic
Rage,” alluding to the ultimate Quixotic metaphor “tilting at windmills.”
²

R

RADICAL CHIC.
Created by
Tom Wolfe
in his 1970 essay about fund-raising events, hosted by the rich and famous, for the revolutionary Black Panthers. The term became generalized to refer to the support of radical causes by fashionable and/or wealthy patrons as evidence of their trendiness.

RATOMORPHIC.
Arthur Koestler
’s term for a view of human behavior modeled on the behavior of laboratory rats and other experimental animals.

RESISTENTIALISM.
Name for a mock-academic theory to describe “seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects.” In other words, a war is being fought between humans and inanimate objects, and all the little annoyances objects inflict on people throughout the day are battles between the two. The term was coined by British humorist
Paul Jennings
in a piece titled “Report on Resistentialism,” published in the
Spectator
in April 1948 and reprinted in the
New York Times
and elsewhere. The slogan of
resistentialism
is “Les choses sont contre nous”—”Things are against us.” In an essay on the subject in the
New York Times
for September 21, 2003, Charles Harrington Elster called resistentialism “a brilliant send-up of Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophy of existentialism.”

RETROMINGENT.
Urinating backward. This term was not coined by
Ben Bradlee
, executive editor of the
Washington Post
, but was given new life when he employed it as a term of derogation in a letter to pesky media critic Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media. In the spring of 1978, Bradlee became fed up with Reed’s rantings and wrote him in part: “You have revealed yourself as a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante and I for one am sick of wasting my time communicating with you.” As Bradlee recalled in his 1996 autobiography,
A Good Life:
“God knows where I found ‘
retromingent
’ but it was the perfect word for the occasion, describing that subspecies of ants (and other animals) which urinate backwards. His supporters were outraged.” Irvine parlayed the insult into hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions.
¹

RETRONYM.
A new name for an object or concept to differentiate its original form or version from a more recent form or version. The term was coined by journalist
Frank Mankiewicz
and was first brought to public attention in a 1980 column by William Safire. More than twenty-five years later Safire wrote that Mankiewicz, who in 1980 was president of National Public Radio, had coined the word in response to the evolution of book formats: “He was especially intrigued by the usage
hardcover book
, which was originally a plain book until soft cover books came along, which were originally called paperback and now have spawned a version the size of a hardcover but with a soft cover trade-named with the retronym trade paperback.” Other examples include landline telephone, acoustic guitar, whole milk, film camera, World War I and regular coffee.” See also the entry for
BACRONYM
.

ROBOT.
Coinage of Czech writer
Karel
Č
apek
’s (1890–1938) in his 1921 work
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).
Č
apek took the Czech term for “serf labor” and adopted it to the animatrons that we think of today. Isaac Asimov invented the words
robotic
and
robotics
after
Č
apek, in 1941.

ROMEO.
A man who embodies the characteristics of Romeo in the play
Romeo and Juliet
.
Although it is commonly assumed that this character was begat in the play by William Shakespeare, the story of Romeo and Juliet originated in European folklore and was developed by a series of writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to the
OED:
“The first version of the story in which the male lover is called
Romeo
is the Italian novella
Hystoria nouellamente ritrouata di due nobili amanti
by
Luigi da Porto (
1486–1529) which was published posthumously in 1530.