Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (15 page)

KNOCK, KNOCK. WHO’S THERE
?
The knock-knock joke was, according to research conducted by poet and anthologist William Cole, a creation of a group of American writers led by humorist, poet, and wit
Dorothy Parker
(1893–1967) and followed by
Marc Connelly
and
Robert Benchley
, who were performing a
knock
-
knock
ritual as early as 1920 at the famous gathering at the Algonquin Hotel in New York known as the Algonquin Round Table. Cole came on this while reading Edmund Wilson’s
The Twenties
, and he then got off a report published in the
New York Times
on October 20, 1982. Cole quoted Wilson’s passage discussing (and generally dismissing) the Algonquin Round Table. He writes, “At one time their favorite game consisted of near-punning use of words. ‘Have you heard Dotty’s “Hiawatha” / “Hiawatha nice girl till I met you.”’” A later entry in Wilson’s diary discusses Parker, giving a couple of really bad knock-knocks, and this rather good one:

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Scrantoknow.

Scrantoknow who?

Scrantoknow you’re appreciated.

L

LACKLUSTER.
Dull, mediocre, lacking brightness.
A word that comes to us from
William Shakespeare
, who, as Jeffrey McQuain and Stanley Malless point out in
Coined by Shakespeare,
had a fondness for using
lack
in combinations such as
lack-beard, lack-brain, lack-linen,
and
lack-love
pointing out that lack is related to the Middle Dutch
lak
for deficiency.
Lackluster
makes its debut in
As You Like It,
in which Jaques describes the antics of a fool: “He drew a diall from his poake: And looking on it, with lacke-lustre eye . . .”
¹

LAME-BRAINED.
A synonym for stupid, introduced by
P. G. Wodehouse
in 1929 in
Mr. Mulliner Speaking
: “A girl with an aunt who knew all about Shakespeare and Bacon must of necessity live in a mental atmosphere into which a lame-brained bird like himself could scarcely hope to soar.” The term was turned into a noun for stupid person, a
lame-brain
as renamed by American humorist and screenwriter
S. J. Perelman
in 1945 in his book
Crazy Like a Fox
in which a female character is addressed as “Miss Lame Brain.”

LAST HURRAH.
A last campaign or valedictory act of a public figure or institution. The term comes from the title of American radio personality, journalist, and novelist
Edwin O’Connor
’s
(1918–1968) 1956 novel
The Last Hurrah,
which was a fictionalized version of the life of
James Michael Curley
(1874–1958), mayor of Boston. A 1958 movie version starred Spencer Tracy and was directed by John Ford.

LILLIPUTIAN.
Adjective used to describe something small or miniature. Created by
Jonathan Swift
in 1727 when he wrote
Gulliver’s Travels
.
He created the island of Lilliput in which the size of the inhabitants was no larger than the size of a human finger.

LINOTYPE.
Whitelaw Reid
(1837–1912), editor of the
New-York Tribune,
originated the name
linotype
for Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention when he examined a line-long slug and cried, “It’s a line of type.”
²

LITTERBUG.
Word coined by
Alice Rush McKeon
(1884–1979), a fierce and early advocate of highway beautification. Her 1931 book
The Litterbug Family
was instrumental in passing the first billboard control law in her home state of Maryland.
³

LITTLE GREY CELLS.
The neurons of the brain that allow fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to click his heels and solve innumerable cases in English mystery author
Agatha Christie
’s (1890–1976)
many stories about the fastidious detective. When asked by a reporter where she got the term, Christie replied, “I suppose I must have
invented
it. I suppose I must have.”
⁴

LIVING-ROOM WAR.
Phrase coined by writer
Michael Arlen
(1895–1956) for an armed conflict that was played out on television. The Vietnam War later became the archetype.

LOST GENERATION.
The period during which World War I was fought (1914–1918), when a high proportion of young men were killed in the trenches; also used more generally of any generation judged to have been deprived of opportunities. The term was coined by
Gertrude Stein
(1874–1946) and made its debut in print in 1926 on the title page of Ernest Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises:

You are all a lost generation.

—Gertrude Stein in conversation
 

LOW MAN ON A TOTEM POLE.
The least successful individual in a group; the person with the least status. Created by American humorist
H. Allen Smith
(1907–1976) as the title for his 1941 bestseller. The book sold over a million copies and was the first in a series of Smith books with memorable, offbeat titles—
Life in a Putty Knife Factory, Lost in the Horse Latitudes,
etc.

LOWBROW.
See
HIGHBROW/LOWBROW
.

M

MCJOB.
Name for a low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector, based on the proclivity of the McDonald’s food chain to preface the names of their products with the proprietary
Mc
prefix, such as Chicken McNuggets. The term was coined by sociologist
Amitai Etzioni and made its debut in print in the
Washington Post
on August 24, 1986, in the article “The Fast-Food Factories: McJobs Are Bad for Kids” and then popularized by Canadian writer
Douglas Coupland
in his novel
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

MALAGA.
A curse.
In his
The Vicomte de Bragelonne,
Alexandre Dumas
has his character Planchet invent a swear word to be employed only in the direst circumstances: “Malaga!” For its intended purpose it achieved some good reviews. Alfred George Gardiner, the essayist, commented, “It is a good swearword. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swearword should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion which evokes it.”

MALAPROP.
An incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance. This eponym word originated from the character Mrs. Malaprop, in the 1775 play
The Rivals
by Irish playwright, poet, and long-term owner of London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane,
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
(1751–1816). As you might expect, Mrs. Malaprop is full of amusing mistakes, exclaiming, “He’s the very pineapple of success!” and “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile!” The adjective
malaproprian
is first used, according to the
OED
, by George Eliot. “Mr. Lewes is sending what a Malapropian friend once called a ‘missile’ to Sara.”
¹

MALTREATER.
Word that debuts in
American writer
Owen Wister
’s
(1860–1938)
The Virginian
in 1902: “A maltreater of hawses [horses.]” Wister is regarded as the “father” of Western fiction, who helped establish the cowboy as an American folk hero and stock fictional character.

MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE.
Someone in absolute control, a term created by
John Dryden
in his 1690 play
Amphitryon
: “I’m all on fire; and would not loose this Night, To be the Master of the Universe.” In 1982 the term was patented in the plural as the name of a series of toy action figures with names like He-Man and Skeletor. In 1987, novelist
Tom Wolfe
recoined the term, alluding to the action figures, as a person who is exceptionally successful in the world of high finance in his novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities
.

MATA HARI.
A beautiful and seductive female spy; by extension a
femme fatale
. Created by English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books
Evelyn Waugh
(1903–1966) after Margaretha Geertruida “M’greet” Zelle MacLeod, better known by the stage name Mata Hari. She was a Dutch exotic dancer and accused spy who was executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for Germany during World War I. The stage name came from the Malay word
mata
for eye and
hari
for day, which as a compound means sun. Waugh turned it into an eponym in 1936 in
Waugh in Abyssinia
: “Patrick’s spy . . . was soon known to the European community as Mata Hari.” In the 1967 movie version of Ian Fleming’s
Casino Royale
, James Bond has conceived a daughter, Mata Bond, with Hari. This would have been impossible since the daughter’s fictional birth was three years after the real female spy died.