Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (11 page)

Fnord is a little pufflike cloud you see at 5 pm.

Fnord lives in the empty space above a decimal point.

Fnord is the 43 1/3rd state, next to Wyoming.

Fnord is the blue stripes in the road that never get painted.

Fnord is the empty pages at the end of the book.

Fnord uses two bathtubs at once.

FOMA.
Harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. They make you feel good and are the basis for US novelist
Kurt Vonnegut
’s
(1922–2007)
fictional religion Bokononism. Examples of common
fomas
: (1) Prosperity is just around the corner. (2) Don’t worry. You’ll get back together.

FOURTH ESTATE.
Traditional name for the press and nowadays called the media. Although it is believed that the term was coined by
Edmund Burke
(1729-1797), the earliest recorded use of the term Fourth Estate to refer to the press is in 1787 when
Thomas Carlyle
wrote in his book
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than them all.”

FRAK.
A faux curse word created by writer
Glen A. Larson
for the original television series
Battlestar Galactica
. The word was mostly overlooked back in the seventies series but has become more and more commonly used in the twenty-first century in places ranging from sitcoms to coffee mugs. The emergence of the verb
frack
(short for the extraction process of hydraulic fracturing) has given new life to the term.

FRANKENSTEIN.
A monster who is out of control. It derives from
the name of Victor Frankenstein, who in
Mary Shelley
’s (1797–1851) 1818 romance
Frankenstein
constructed a human monster from an accumulation of human body parts and endowed it with life. In 2005 the
Oxford English Dictionary
added an entry for
Frankenstein food
as food that has been genetically modified or irradiated (also called
Frankenfood
).

FREAKONOMICS.
For
freak economics
, a clever meld word coined by economist
Steven D. Levitt
and journalist
Stephen J. Dubner
in their 2005 book
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
It’s economics based on conventional wisdom, common sense, and numbers. Much of freakonomics confirms what we have long suspected—for example, that political candidates who have a lot of money to finance their campaigns are still out of luck if no one likes them—but it is still enlightening when stated in economic terms.

FREELANCE.
One who sells services to employers without a long-term commitment to any of them; an uncommitted independent, as in politics or social life. The word is not recorded before
Sir Walter Scott
(1771–1832) introduced it in
Ivanhoe,
which, among other things, is often considered the first historic novel in the modern sense. Scott’s freelancers were mercenaries who pledged their loyalty and arms for a fee. This was its first appearance: “I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them—I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders; thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.”
⁴

FRENEMY.
A blend of
friend
and
enemy
coined in 1953 by the American journalist
Walter Winchell
(1897–1972). “Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies [
sic
].” Can refer to either an enemy disguised as a friend or to a friend who is “a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or to a friend who is simultaneously a competitor and rival.”

FRIENDING.
The act of befriending, a term coined by
Shakespeare
in
Hamlet
, act 1, scene 5:

And what so poor a man as Hamlet is

May do, to express his love and friending to you.

In
The Shakespeare Key
, a book published in 1879, the authors Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke make the point that this overlooked coinage could be adopted by the larger language as a word implying “friendly feeling.” With the advent of the social network Facebook in 2004,
friended
became widely adopted. Two other words from the Clarkes’ list appear later in this lexicon:
irregulous
and
smilet
.
⁵

FRUMIOUS.
Blend of
fuming
and
furious
created and applied by
Lewis Carroll
beginning in 1871 in
Through the Looking-Glass
with the warning: “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!”

FUDGE.
This exclamation of contempt made its literary debut in Anglo-Irish novelist
Oliver Goldsmith
’s (1730–1774)
The Vicar of Wakefield
describing the very impolite behavior of Mr. Burchell, who at the conclusion of every sentence would cry out
fudge
.
⁶

FUTURE SHOCK.
A term created by
Alvin Toffler
for his 1970 book of the same name to describe a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies where there is the perception of there being “too much change in too short a period of time.” A key element of this state was “information overload,” and he painted a picture of people who were isolated and depressed, cut off from human intimacy by a relentless fire hose of messages and data barraging them.

*
Lately
factoid
has come to mean a trivial fact. That usage makes it a
contranym
(also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as cleve (to cling or to split), sanction (to permit or to punish), and citation (a commendation or a summons to appear in court.)

G

G-MEN.
Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so called by
Walter Winchell
after the term that was used by Machine Gun Kelly to describe FBI agents as “government men.”

GALUMPHING.
Lewis Carroll
’s word for a way of “trotting” downhill, while keeping one foot farther back than the other. This enables the
galumpher
to stop quickly. Generally believed to be a blend of
gallop
and
triumph,
the word first appears in the poem about the Jabberwocky, from
Through the Looking-Glass.
In modern application the term has been used to mean “to move clumsily” at one extreme and “to prance in triumph” at the other.

GAMESMANSHIP.
The art of winning games by using various ploys and tactics to gain a psychological advantage; how to win without really cheating. The term was the creation of
Stephen Potter
(1900–1969) in 1947 in his book
The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship
or The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating
. Through
Gamesmanship
, Potter introduced the facetious use of the -
manship
suffix, which spawned a number of other
-
manship
words, such as
brinkmanship
(first coined by Adlai Stevenson at the height of the Cold War). Potter went on to expand the concept into the social realm with
Lifemanship
, published in 1950 and then
One-upmanship,
published in 1952, which gave the language the word
one-upmanship
and the condition of being
one up
.

GARGANTUAN.
From
François Rabelais
’s (1490–1553) sixteenth-century series of novels entitled
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, a satirical story about a giant and his son.

GENE.
The basic physical unit of heredity, a term coined by Danish botanist and—by extension of his own term—geneticist
Wilhelm Johannsen
(1857–1927) in 1909 in his book
Elements of the Exact Heredity
(
Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre
). The term was created to be neutral by not tying to any given theory of heredity. He later combined it with the root
type
to form the word
genotype
and it was later used as the basis for other terms up to and including
genom
e (a full set of chromosomes)
.
¹

GENTLEMAN FARMER.
A country gentleman engaged in farming, usually on his own estate; by extension, a man of independent means who farms chiefly for pleasure rather than income. The concept first appeared in print in
Henry Fielding
’s
Tom Jones
in 1749: “My Father was one of those whom they call a Gentleman Farmer. He had a little Estate of about 300 shillings a Year.”

GENTRIFICATION.
The process of middle-class or affluent people moving into and rebuilding deteriorating urban areas, often displacing poorer residents. The term was created by British sociologist
Ruth Glass
(1912–1990)
in 1964 when she wrote: “One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences . . . Once this process of  ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers is displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.”

GILDED AGE.
The period following the Civil War, roughly from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the turn of the twentieth century. The term was coined by
Mark Twain
and essayist-editor
Charles Dudley Warner
(1829–1900) in
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
They satirized what they believed to be an era of serious social problems, greedy schemes, and vulgar extravagances obscured by a thin layer of gold
.