Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (26 page)

WHITE MAN’S BURDEN.
Term coined by
Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936), the English writer and poet who viewed European imperialism in general and Anglo-American imperialism in particular as the salvation of the nonwhite world. One of Kipling’s most famous poems, “The White Man’s Burden,”
was published in 1899. It celebrated the racial superiority of white people and praised the men and women who carried “white” virtues to the “backward” peoples of the world. As Donald H. Dyal reports in his
Historical Dictionary of the Spanish American War,
“Kipling sent the first copy to Theodore Roosevelt, whom he believed was the one American most likely to appreciate it. Roosevelt did.”
⁵

WHODUNIT.
A traditional murder mystery. Book critic
Donald Gordon
created the term in the July 1930
American News of Books
when he said of a new mystery novel: “
Half-Mast Murder
, by Milward Kennedy—A satisfactory
whodunit
.” The term became so popular that by 1939, according to the Merriam-Webster website, “at least one language pundit had declared it ‘already heavily overworked’ and predicted it would ‘soon be dumped into the taboo bin.’  ” History has proven that prophecy false, and
whodunit
is still going strong. In attributing this neologism to Gordon, the April 1946 issue of
Word Study
noted: “Apparently, a verbal invention, like the man on the flying trapeze, floats through the air with the greatest of ease.”

WIMP.
The Wymps were characters in a series of children’s books by
Evelyn Sharpe
(1869–1955), who was a key figure in the British women’s suffrage movement. She was also a tax resister who was twice imprisoned for her actions including breaking the windows of government offices. In her 1898 book
All the Way to Fairyland,
the Wymps first appear as eponymous characters who loved to play practical jokes but cried when anyone returned the favor. The earliest appearance in the modern sense and spelling appears in George Ade’s 1920 collection
Hand-made Fables
.
In his 1925
Arrowsmith,
Sinclair Lewis wrote of “wimpish young men.”
⁶

WINE-DARK SEA.
A noun modified by a compound adjective term from
Homer
,
who doted on such constructions as this and others like
far-darting Apollo.
In the September 1936 issue of
Word Study
, it is reported that one of the cofounders of
Time
magazine, Britton Haddon (1838-1929), owned a copy of
The Iliad
in which all of the compound epithets were underlined.
Time
pioneered such double locutions as
legacy-stalking
and telescoped neologisms as
cinemaddict, sophomoron,
and
franchisler.

WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG.
Lord Byron
used a similar phrase in
Don Juan
: “Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda water the day after.”
⁷

WORD WORD.
A word that is repeated to distinguish it from a
seemingly
identical word or name, created by
Paul Dickson
. There are situations when it is necessary to repeat a word in order to make sure a reader knows what you are talking about. For instance, you might be asked, “Are you talking about an American Indian or an
Indian Indian
?” Or in distinguishing between the grass that grows on lawns and marijuana: “Oh, you’re talking about
grass grass
. I thought you were talking about grass.” Word words are necessary in an increasingly digital universe—e. g.,
mail mail
for letters sent through the postal system instead of e-mail and
book book
for printed books instead of e-books.

In 1982, I observed: “From what I have been able to determine, there is no word for this phenomenon, and
‘word word’
seemed to be a logical name to give it.” Richard Nordquist, PhD in English, professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Armstrong Atlantic State University, noted in his online language forum that there actually is a more formal term for a
word word,
which is the eminently forgettable:
contrastive focus reduplication.
⁸
(Word word now appears in several major reference works including
The Oxford Companion to the English Language,
which suggests it has already left
contrastive focus reduplication
in the dust.)
⁹

WORK IN PROGRESS.
Term coined by
Ford Madox Ford
for a not-yet-complete artistic, theatrical, or musical work, often made available for public viewing or listening. Ford applied it for snippets of James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
which he published as the editor of the
Transatlantic Review
. (The term is now used to describe young athletes who are raw but talented.)
¹⁰

WORKAHOLIC.
In 1971, Dr.
Wayne E. Oates
(1917-1999) wrote
Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction,
adding a word to the lexicon of the English language. His concept was that work can become an addiction, akin to alcoholism. Oates remarked in an interview at the time the book was published that the work addict “drops out of the human community” in a drive for peak performance. Oates’s use of
-aholic
opened the drawbridge for a host of new words implying addictions. Although
chocoholic
and
cakeaholic
were already in use, in the wake of
workaholic
, came
shopaholic
,
computerholic
, and so on.
¹¹

WORLD’S MY OYSTER.
In
Merry Wives of Windsor
Shakespeare
uses the phrase “the world’s mine oyster,” meaning the world is the place from which to extract profit—as one would extract a pearl from an oyster.

Why then the world’s mine oyster,

Which I with sword will open.
¹²

WUNDERKIND.
Wonder child; a highly talented child; a child prodigy, especially in music. The word was borrowed from German and introduced into English by
George Bernard Shaw
in 1891: “Every generation produces its infant Raphaels and infant Rosciuses, and Wunderkinder who can perform all the childish feats of Mozart.”
¹³

X Y Z

X.
As a verb to supply with X’s in place of type or to X out.
Edgar Allan Poe
wrote in a 1849 essay entitled
“
X-ing a Paragrab”:
“‘I shell have to x this ere paragrab,’ said he to himself, as he read it over . . . So x it he did, unflinchingly, and to press it went x-ed.”

XANTIPPE.
The wife of Socrates, portrayed as a scolding and quarrelsome woman. By extension any nagging or irritable woman.

In
Shakespeare
’s
The Taming of the Shrew,
Petruchio compares Katherine “As Socrates’ Xantippe or a worse” in act 1, scene 2.
¹

YAHOO.
In
Jonathan Swift
’s satirical novel
Gulliver’s Travels
, a
Yahoo
is one of a race of brutes, having the form and all the vices of humans, who are subject to the Houyhnhnm, an intelligent equine race: “The Fore-feet of the Yahoo differed from my Hands in nothing else, but the Length of the Nails, the Coarseness and Brownness of the Palms, and the Hairiness on the Backs.” The word has become a charactronym for a boorish person or lout, and beginning in 1994, as the name of Yahoo!.com of a popular Internet server that began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information, and purchase things. The name Yahoo! began as an acronym for “yet another hierarchical officious oracle,” but the founders of the company insisted that they ultimately selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, and uncouth”—a way they described themselves.
²

YES MAN.
The term came from a 1913
T. A. ‘Tad’ Dorgan
(1877–1929)
cartoon in which the
yes men
were assistant newspaper editors praising the word of the editor. Dorgan was famous as a satirical cartoonist and, later, as a sports commentator, first on the
San Francisco
Bulletin
(1892–1902) and later on the
New York
Journal
. New Zealand British lexicographer
Eric Partridge
(1894–1979) wrote about Dorgan in his
Dictionary of Catch Phrases
: “It was he who coined the phrases, ‘Yes, we have no bananas,’ ‘23-skiddoo,’ ‘See what the boys in the back room will have,’ ‘Officer, call a cop,’ and ‘Let him up, he’s all cut [drunk].’ Among the other apothegms he invented, still part of our common speech, were such daisies as ‘The first hundred years are the hardest,’ ‘The only place you’ll find sympathy is in the dictionary’ and ‘Half the world are squirrels and the other half are nuts.’ Tad evolved the catch phrase ‘nobody home’ to denote incomprehension, witlessness, or downright idiocy in those he was shafting.”
³

YOGIBOGEYBOX.
The paraphernalia of a spiritualist in
James Joyce
’s
Ulysses.

ZARK.
An all-purpose expletive created by the English humorist and science fiction novelist
Douglas Noel Adams
(1952–2001) for his internationally bestselling science fiction novel
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
.

ZELIG.
A person who is able to befriend the influential and powerful. It is the invention of
Woody Allen
for his 1983 film of the same name whose main character, Leonard Zelig, is a nondescript man who, out of his desire to fit in and be liked, takes on the characteristics of the strong and famous personalities around him.

ZOMBIFICATION.
The process by which consumerism and “soul-sapping popular culture” turns the living into the walking dead, a term coined by Romanian-born American writer and poet
Andrei Codrescu
.
“The world is undergoing zombification. It was gradual for a while, a few zombies here and there, mostly in high office, where being a corpse in a suit was de rigueur . . . The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis they induce in people who aren’t quite zombies yet.”

Epilogue—Cold Comfort

There are fewer authorisms by contemporary writers in this collection than by those who died before the dawn of the twentieth century—and even fewer by contemporary women writers. This was not intentional; nor is it surprising. A large part of the explanation can be found in the competition from other fields (food, technology, pop culture to name a few) and the hurdles writers face to have their new words accepted by the public and by the official gatekeepers in the editorial offices of the
Oxford English Dictionary
,
Merriam-Webster,
and their ilk. But the fact is that the mission of these lexical guardians is not to please writers but to serve a language.