Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (8 page)

DAIQUIRI.
The cocktail that is named for a district in Cuba was first acknowledged in print in 1920 in
F. Scott Fitzgerald
’s (1896–1940)
This Side of Paradise.
Fitzgerald probably did not coin the term or invent the drink, but he went a long way toward introducing it to a larger audience in the 1920 novel in which a character begins the night by ordering “four double daiquiris” from an “old jitney waiter.” In what could have been a cautionary tale for the alcoholic Fitzgerald, the character then sees a man turn into a purple zebra, “a figment of his besotted imagination.”
*

DEBUNK.
Word created by novelist, biographer, and former advertising copywriter
William E. Woodward
(1874–1950) for the process of exposing false claims. He used it in his 1923 novel
Bunk
,
in which he also created the term
debunker
and
debunking
. Others would later debunk Woodward’s biographies of George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant that attempted to debunk great figures of history but were generally dismissed as exercises in cynicism and little else.
²

DEMIMONDE.
Alexandre Dumas
(1802–1870), best known for his historical novels of high adventure,
created this term in 1855 for the title of his play,
Le Demi-Monde
. The term
demimonde
(literally, half world) originally designated a class of fallen society women—women with a past who are therefore compromised. Over time the definition came to be much broader, including all women of loose morals who lived at the edge of respectable society and, by extension, the men—royal, aristocratic, bourgeois, and bohemian—who frequented that shadowy world. Dumas complained that his word had been taken over and was devoid of its original meaning. C. S. Lewis examined this word and its transformation in his
Studies in Words
and warned: “Aspiring neologists will draw a moral. Invent a word if you like. It may be adopted. It may even become popular. But don’t reckon on its retaining the sense you gave it and perhaps explained with great care.”
³

DEMONYM.
Term created by
Paul Dickson
and initially presented in the form of a dictionary definition:

demonym
n
.
1
. [from Greek
demos
“the people” or “populace” +
-
nym
“name”] A name commonly given to the residents of a place or a people. The names Briton,
Midwesterner,
Liverpudlian,
Arkansawyer,
and
Parisienne
are all
demonyms
.
2.
An adjective of residence. It may be the same as the noun (
Haitian
) or it may be different (
Swede
for the noun,
Swedish
for the adjective).
*

DINOSAUR.
A long-extinct race of reptiles, some of gigantic size. Their name was coined and bestowed on them in 1841 by
Sir
Richard Owen
(1804–1892), who explained the name in the
Proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
in 1842. In that article, Owen wrote, “The combination of such characters, some, as it were, from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.” The name came from the Greek
deinos,
meaning fearfully great, and
sauros,
meaning lizard.
⁴

DIRT PUNCHER.
Farmer or farm worker, a term created by
Eugene O’Neill
(1888–1953) for his play
The Rope
, which was first performed in 1918. Near the end of the play, the prodigal son tells how he feels about life on a farm and what his father’s farm means to him. There he says, “I don’t want no truck with this rotten farm. You kin have my share of that. I ain’t made to be no damned dirt puncher—not me! And I ain’t goin’ to loaf round here more’n I got to, and when I goes this time I ain’t never comin’ back. Not me! Not to punch dirt and milk cows. You kin have the rotten farm for all of me. What I wants is cash—regular coin yuh kin spend—not dirt.” O’Neill also inverted the term to form a verb
to punch dirt
.

Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill

DISMAL SCIENCE.
A term coined by Scottish writer, essayist, and historian
Thomas Carlyle
(1795–1881) to describe the discipline of economics. It was inspired by T. R. Malthus’s gloomy prediction that population would always grow faster than food, dooming mankind to unending poverty and hardship.

DISQUALIFY.
To deprive of the qualifications required for some purpose; to render unqualified. Though there were variations on the word
disqualify
before being first used by
Jonathan Swift
in 1733, Swift appears to be the first to use this term in print. He also later uses it in referring to himself. In a letter to Alexander Pope in 1736: “My common illness is of that kind which utterly disqualifies me for all conversation; I mean my Deafness.”
⁵

DOORMAT.
As a metaphor applied to a person upon whom other people “wipe their boots.” First used in this sense by
Charles Dickens
in
Great Expectations
: “She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under our feet, and how we dared to use her so.”

DOUBLETHINK.
The ability to accept as equally valid two entirely contrary beliefs.
George Orwell
wrote in
1984
: “His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.”

DRACULA.
Name for the king of the vampires, invented by
Bram Stoker
(1847–1912) in the 1897 novel of this name, used allusively to denote a grotesque or terrifying person.

DRAGON LADY.
Any powerful villainous woman, from the character of the same name created in 1936 by
Milt Caniff
(1907–1988)
for his
Terry and the Pirates
comic strip. She makes her first appearance in the strip of September 6 with the introductory line: “Mongolian Princess, My Eye! That woman is the
Dragon Lady
!”

DRECK.
Rubbish, worthless debris, a Yiddishism that the
OED
lists as having been introduced by
James Joyce
(1882-1941) in
Ulysses,
“Farewell. Fare thee well.
Dreck
!”
⁶
This was probably in wide use long before Joyce but there is no earlier example in the context of written English.

DROODLE.
A riddle in the form of a simple line drawing—a blend of drawing and riddle. The term was invented and copyrighted by writer-cartoonist
Roger Price
(1918–1990), who published a book entitled
Droodles
in 1953. Droodle is a true lexical rarity in that it is not listed in the
OED
and neither is his other creation, the
mad lib,
which he created in 1953 with Leonard Stern.

DYMAXION.
The term is used in referring to construction and design by
R. Buckminster Fuller
(1895–1983): as “yielding the greatest possible efficiency in terms of the available technology, ‘doing the most with the least.’” The word was created by blending the word
dynamic
and the concept of
maximum service
. The word was not coined by Fuller. He explained in a 1969 private communication to the editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary
that the word was coined for him in 1929 by his business associates as a “word-portrait” of him and his work. They were concerned to form a euphonious word of four syllables based on words that occurred in Fuller’s own description of his prototype (Dymaxion) house, viz,
dy
(namism),
max
(imum), and
ion
. When Fuller wrote his treatise on
dymaxion
,
Nine Chains to the Moon
, Carl Wiegman reviewed the book for the
Chicago Tribune
and noted, “It would be a lot more dymaxion if Mr. Fuller did not have a literary style that almost drives a reader crazy.”
⁷
*

DYSTOPIA.
See entry for
UTOPIA
.

*
The drink consumed by Fitzgerald and his fictional characters was probably as follows:

2 ounces light rum

1 ounce fresh lime juice

¼ –½ ounce simple syrup

Add all ingredients except the garnish with ice in a shaker. Shake well to combine. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish.