Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (16 page)

MAU-MAU.
To terrorize by intimidation, a creation of Tom Wolfe in his 1970 work
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing Flak Catchers.
“Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco.” The name came from the Mau Mau, an anti-European secret society in colonial Kenya.

ME DECADE.
Label for the 1970s in America that was coined by novelist
Tom Wolfe
in
New York
magazine in August 1976, describing the new preoccupation with self-awareness and the collective retreat from history, community, and human reciprocity.
²

MEEKER.
To visit places that have acquired some sort of shrine status. As demonstrated by its inventor,
Ivor Brown
, “Myriads . . . go meekering at Stratford-upon-Avon.”

MELTING POT.
Metaphor for a unified albeit diverse United States, first employed in this sense of the term by writer
Israel Zangwill
(1864–1926) in his 1908 play
The Melting Pot,
which developed the theme. The term was enthusiastically embraced by turn-of-the-century Americans who were eager to find a unifying national concept at a time when the United States was becoming more ethnically diverse than ever before. “The metaphor was hugely popular when it was introduced, and the play was a big success with the general public,” wrote Peter D. Salins in his book
Assimilation, American Style.
He added,
“President Theodore Roosevelt was so enamored of the play’s message that he compared Zangwill favorably to George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. Popular faith in the melting pot survived both the Great Depression and World War II. But it did not survive the 1960s.”
³

While Zangwill
made the term popular it was created in a different context by essayist, lecturer, and poet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803–1882), who
heralded this philosophy in 1845 when he wrote in his journal “so in this continent—asylum of all nations,—the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the melting pot of the Dark Ages.”

MEME.
The fundamental units of culture, like DNA. First coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins
, “a meme represents ideas, behaviors or styles that spread from person to person. It can be a trendy dance, a viral video, a new fashion, a technological tool or a catchphrase. Like viruses, memes arise, spread, mutate and die.” One of the problems with the term that may hamper its ultimate use in conversational English is that there is considerable confusion as to how to pronounce the word.

MENTAL MASTURBATION.
A vivid metaphor constructed by
Lord Byron
(1788-1824) and applied to John Keats. In a letter to his publisher, John Murray, he said of the poet: “Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always frigging his imagination—I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium.”
⁴

MICROCOMPUTER.
A
small computer employing microprocessors based on a single chip. In the July 1956 issue of
the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
American science fiction writer
Isaac Asimov
(1920–1992) debuted the term in a story called “The Dying Night” in this line: “It had become the hallmark of the scientist, much as . . . the microcomputer that of the statistician.” The term is often paired with the word
revolution
to describe the period beginning in the early 1980s when inexpensive personal computers first became available to the public. Asimov was a prolific writer who was the first (and, thus far, only) author to have a book in every one of the ten categories in the Dewey decimal classification (generalities, philosophy, religion, social sciences, language, natural sciences, technology, the arts, literature, and lastly geography and history).

MIDDLE AMERICA.
Journalist
Joseph Kraft
(1924–1986) of the
Washington Post
is credited with inventing the term. Kraft also served as a speech writer for John F. Kennedy.
⁵

MILQUETOAST.
A painfully timid and ineffectual male—or in British terms a milksop. An eponym inspired by cartoonist
H. T. Webster
’s
(1885–1952) character Caspar Milquetoast in his 1924
Timid Soul
cartoon strip and named after a once-popular American dish,
milk toast,
which during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was thought to be a proper and soothing dish for ill children and the ailing aged.
*

MILVER.
A person with a strong interest in common with another, but especially an interest in words and wordplay. Coined by American essayist and critic
Logan Pearsall Smith
(1865–1946) in response to a friend’s lament that there was no satisfactory word in English for “a person who is enthusiastic about the same thing you are enthusiastic about.” Smith decided it was too clumsy to say fellow fan or coenthusiast; so he created the word
milver
, which had the added advantage of giving poets a word they could rhyme with
silver
. As he explained in his 1936 book
Reperusals and Recollections,
“Language being never adequate to describe all the relationships of people to each other, I have invented the word
milver
to describe those who share a fad in common.” There is a myth that no English word rhymes with silver, but there are several existing words to which milver is added. The others are
chilver
,
filver
, and
hilver
. Chilver is an Old English noun meaning a ewe lamb.

MITTY.
See
WALTER MITTY
.

MOANISM.
Habitual lamenting, the creation of poet
Robert Frost
, and now regarded as a Frostian nonce word.
⁶

MOBY DICK.
Something important, impressive, and by extension rare or even unique. Likened to the great white whale central to
Herman Melville
’s novel of the same name, Melville appears to have adopted the name from real-life albino sperm whale, known as Mocha Dick that lived near the island of Mocha off Chile’s southern coast, several decades before he wrote his book.
*

MODERNISM.
Characteristic of modern times or something with distinctly modern features. The term first appeared in 1737 as an apparent coinage of
Jonathan Swift
in a letter to Alexander Pope decrying the “corruption of English by those Scribblers who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailing and quaint modernisms.”
⁷
See also
POSTMODERNISM
.

MODUS VIVENDI.
A Latin phrase (way of living) referring to a practical compromise; especially one that bypasses difficulties and is resolved peacefully. First written in English by American writer
Henry James
(1843–1916) in the
Nation
magazine in 1875 discussing the Jews: “In Portugal they found a modus Vivendi which, though still hard, was easier than the Spanish rule.”

MOLE.
A high-level penetration agent who betrays his or her intelligence service sharing its secrets with its enemy; and by extension any informant buried within an organization. The term was popularized by British spy novelist
John le Carré
in 1974 in his novel
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
where many believed it made its debut: “Ivlov’s task was to service a mole. A mole is a deep penetration agent so called because he burrows deep into the fabric of Western imperialism.” Le Carré never claimed to have coined the term, only to have revived the term. According to Joseph C. Goulden in his
Dictionary of Espionage
,
Walter Pforzheimer, former CIA legislative counsel, states that the term was actually first used by British philosopher, statesman, and author
Sir Francis Bacon
in his 1622 biography of King Henry VII: “He was careful and liberal to obtaine good Intelligence from all parts abroad . . . He had such Moles perpetually working and casting to undermine him.” The
OED
, which does not list the Bacon reference, lists several twentieth-century earlier uses including a 1964 book by Geoffrey Bailey on Russian intelligence called
The Conspirators
that reported that in 1935 the Russians recruited a Captain Fedosenko as a double agent and gave him the alias “The Mole.” That said it was le Carré
⁸
who made the term a key one in both reality and fiction in the decades following publication of the novel.

MOMISM.
Term for excessive attachment to one’s mother, created by science fiction writer and self-appointed social critic
Philip Wylie
(1902–1971) in an essay in his 1942
Generation of Vipers
. Wylie’s contention was that mothers had turned their children, but mostly their sons, into resourceless, eternally dependent fools. “Mom,” he wrote, “is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul but a womanly defense. In a thousand of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge.” Wylie’s mindless venom and the issue of
momism
created a national controversy for more than a decade. His most quoted line on the subject: “She is the corpse at every wedding and the bride at every funeral.”

MONDEGREEN.
A term for misheard song lyrics, coined by American freelance writer
Sylvia Wright
(1920–1961) in 1954. It derived from her long-held belief that a song contained the line, “They had slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen.” In fact, the line ended with the words, “and laid him on the green.”  There have been a number of books, articles, and Internet sites devoted to collecting such classic examples as “Deck the Halls with Buddy Holly,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Pants,” and the Elton John classic, “Ken Doll in the Wind.” In a series of articles on
mondegreens
in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, writer Dave Matheny gave a number of fine examples including the hymn “Lead on, O King Eternal,” which became “Lead on, O Kinky Turtle.”

MONKEY TRIAL.
Term first coined by
H. L. Mencken
himself for the 1925 Scopes trial, the first American “trial of the century,” which pitted the modernist against the fundamentalist and the provincial in a courtroom drama of enormous interest, much of it engineered by Mencken. Forty years later, Scopes would say, “In a way, it was Mencken’s show.”