Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (13 page)

GROUPTHINK.
Term coined by social psychologist
Irving Janis
(1918-1990) in 1972 to describe what occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” Groups affected by
groupthink
ignore alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that dehumanize other groups. A group is especially vulnerable to groupthink when its members are similar in background, when the group is insulated from outside opinions, and when there are no clear rules for decision making.
⁶

GRUNTLED.
Back formation of disgruntled meaning to be satisfied, content. It seems to have made its debut in 1938 in English humorist
P. G. Wodehouse
’s
(1881–1975)
The Code of the Woosters
: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”

*
A question that arises with nonce words is do they lose their nonceness now that they appear here. For that matter, will
nonceness
now appear in the
OED
because this could be its debut in print?

H

HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS.
The afterlife in the spiritual world of the Mohicans and other Indian tribes written about in 1826 by
James Fenimore Cooper
: “A young man has gone to the happy hunting grounds!” The next recorded user of the term was Washington Irving, adding to what Charles L. Cutler called its “literary aura.”
¹

HARD-BOILED.
Hardened, hardheaded, uncompromising. A term documented as being first used by
Mark Twain
in 1886 as an adjective meaning “hardened.” In a speech he alluded to
hard-boiled
, hidebound grammar.
Apparently, Twain and others saw the boiling of an egg to harden the white and yolk as a metaphor for other kinds of hardening.
²

HEART OF DARKNESS.
The evil subconscious that lurks inside human nature. The term was created by
Joseph Conrad
(1857–1924), a Polish author who wrote in English. In his 1902 story of the same name, the narrator searches for a man named Kurtz, a cruel white trader who lives deep in the jungle.

Joseph Conrad

HEAVY METAL.
Highly amplified, harsh-sounding rock music with a strong beat, characteristically using violent or fantastic imagery. The term was adopted as a musical reference by
Creem
writer
Lester Bangs
(1948-1982) who began using it in the mid-seventies, taking the term from passages of William Burroughs’s 1959 novel
Naked Lunch
.
³

HEEBIE-JEEBIES.
A feeling of uneasiness or nervousness; the jitters often transmitted from one person to another. Coined by American cartoonist
William De Beck
(1890–1942) in his comic strip
Barney Google
. The term debuted in 1923 in the
New York American
: “You dumb ox—why don’t you get that stupid look offa your pan—you gimme the heeby jeebys!”
*
It was not until its second appearance in the comic that the term was given its final spelling: “31,000 shares! Worthless stock of ‘the Belgian Hair Tonic Company’ wiped out! Every cent I had in the world . . . It gives me the heebie jeebies.”
⁴

HEFFALUMP.
Child’s word for elephant that debuted in 1926 in
A. A. Milne
’s
Winnie-the-Pooh:
“He would go up very quietly to the Six Pine Trees now, peep very cautiously into the Trap, and see if there
was
a Heffalump there.” The
OED
notes that the term is “now commonly in adult use.”

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED.
An abbreviated yet famous line coined by playwright and poet
William Congreve
(1670–1729) in 1697.
The entire quote reads “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned,” spoken by Perez in act 3, scene 2,
The Mourning Bride
.

HIGHBROW/LOWBROW.
Distinction between intellectual elite and those who shun higher culture in favor of that which is popular and easily accessible. Opera is
highbrow
; popular music is
lowbrow
. The distinction is based on phrenology, in which having a high brow is seen as evidence of a larger brain, hence higher intellect. First applied to cultural taste and proclivity by US author, writer, and journalist
Will Irwin (
1873–1948) in a series of articles in the
New York Sun
in 1902.

HIGH-TONED.
Adjective created by
Sir Walter Scott
to mean “nobly elevated.”

HIPPISM.
A philistine’s resentment of a curiosity about the meaning of words. This term was coined by conservative American author and commentator
William F. Buckley Jr
. (1925–2008) after reading an attack on I. Moyer Hunsberger’s
Quintessential Dictionary
by a Tampa, Florida, librarian named Joseph Hipp.

HOLISMO.
Exaggerated holism; the belief that holistic medicine is a panacea. The word was created by
Fitzhugh Mullan
, MD, in response to the “outpouring of holism” offered by friends and acquaintances when he was seriously ill. The word made its debut in Mullan’s article, “The Rising of Holismo,” in
Hospital Physician
magazine.

HOLON.
Word coined by Hungarian British author and journalist
Arthur Koestler
(1905–1983). He used it to describe an entity that is itself a
whole
but simultaneously
part
of a larger whole, in an infinite series, such that each entity is neither whole nor part, but a whole/part, or
holon.

HOMINIST.
George Bernard Shaw
’s 1903 antonym to
feminist
: “One who advocates for men the rights and privileges conventionally accorded to women.”

HONEY TRAP.
A ploy in which an attractive person, usually a woman, lures another, usually a man, into revealing information; by extension, a person employing such a ploy. The term first came into play in 1974 in novelist
John le Carré
’s
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
: “You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey-trap.”
⁵

HONKY TONK.
A tawdry roadhouse with a jukebox, a dance floor, and a bar. The term already existed but did not become a common term until
Carl Sandburg
used it in his
American Songbook
in 1927 in reference to the blues: “It was moaned by resonant moaners in honky tonks of the southwest.”

HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS.
Meaning “the state of being able to achieve honors,” this twenty-seven-letter word coined by
Shakespeare
in his comedy
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is a testament to the Bard’s own linguistic skills. It has been posited that this is the longest word in the English language with alternating consonants and vowels.
⁶

HOOTCHY-KOOTCHY.
A provocative dance, associated with the dancer Little Egypt at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The first appearance of the term in print is from an 1898 column by American humorist
Finley Peter Dunne
(1867–1936).

HUB.
Boston as seen as the point around which the universe turns, a long-lived conceit drawn by
Oliver Wendell Holmes
in
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table:
“Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the entirety of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.” Over time the metaphor was extended and Boston became the Hub of the Universe, and the term still lives on especially in sports reporting. Holmes is also credited with coining the term
Boston Brahmin
, a nickname for the wealthy enlightened class of Boston’s mid-nineteenth century. Brahmin, from the name of the highest caste among the Hindus of India, stuck and is still very much in use today.
⁷

HYSTERIA.
This medical term (a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by such disorders as convulsions) was first extended by American author, poet, editor, and literary critic
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849) in 1839 to mean being in a morbidly excited condition; to express unhealthy emotions or excitement. The original medical term derives from a Latin term meaning womb because it was believed that the condition was more common in women.
⁸

*
 Pan = face, in the slang of the period.

I

IDENTITY CRISIS.
In psychology a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person’s sense of self becomes insecure, typically due to a change in his or her expected aims or role in society. Coined and defined by psychoanalyst-writer
Erik Erikson
(1902–1994) in his 1954 psychological profile of George Bernard Shaw.
¹

ILLTH.
Antonym for wealth in the sense of well-being; ill-being. It was coined by British art critic and philanthropist
John Ruskin
(1819–1900) in 1862 in
Unto This Last
: “As mere accidental stays and impediments acting not as wealth, but (for we ought to have a correspondent term) as ‘illth.’” He applied the term to designate those riches that appear to be desirable but are actually “fool’s gold or worse.”
²