Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (18 page)

NERD.
The word
first appears in print in 1950 in the children’s book
If I Ran the Zoo
by American children’s writer
Dr. Seuss
(Theodor Seuss Geisel 1904–1991). In the book a boy named Gerald McGrew makes a great number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do if he were in charge at the zoo where, he insists, the animals housed there were boring. Among these fanciful schemes is:

And then just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo

And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO,

A NERKLE, a NERD, and SEERSUCKER, too!

The accompanying illustration for
nerd
shows a grumpy Seuss creature with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt—not terribly nerdlike. For whatever reasons,
it-kutch,
preep, proo,
and
nerkle
have never been enshrined in any dictionary.

NESOMANIAC.
A person who is mad about islands. A creation of American author
James A. Michener
(1907–1997), who introduced it in the January 1978 issue of
Travel and Leisure.

NEWSPEAK.
Artificial language spoken in
George Orwell
’s dystopic
1984.
An example of this language is the word
Duckspeak
, which is a
Newspeak
term meaning literally to quack like a duck or to speak without thinking. Duckspeak can be either good or
ungood
(bad), depending on who is speaking, and whether what they are saying is in following with the ideals of Big Brother. To speak rubbish and lies may be ungood, but to speak rubbish and lies for the good of “The Party” may be good.
Oldspeak
refers to conventional English, which would have been superseded by Newspeak by the year 2050.

NIBFUL.
A literary measure created and used by English author
Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941). As much ink as a nib can hold; also a small amount of writing in 1930 in her
Diaries
: “I have just finished, with this very nib-ful of ink, the last sentence of
The Waves
.”

NINJA.
One trained in the feudal Japanese art of ninjutsu and/or specially trained for assassination and espionage. Term and concept introduced into English by British spy novelist
Ian Fleming
in 1964 in the James Bond novel
You Only Live Twice
: “The men . . . are now learning to be
ninja
or ‘stealers-in.’” It was popularized by such works as Eric Van Lustbader’s 1980 novel
The Ninja
and the 1981 film
Enter the Ninja.
The term has proliferated to the point that a 2013 Google search for the word yielded 427 million hits. There is a site online, for instance, called Ninjawords, which according to its home page, is “optimized to return a definition instantly as soon as you hit enter, and your search is spellchecked in multiple ways until we find a good match. Ninjas like to stay lean and mean, which is why there is no junk cluttering your dictionary, slowing you down.”
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NO-NECK.
Pejorative noun or adjective for a person with a short neck or large head who by extension is to be shunned. It appears to have been coined as an insult in American playwright
Tennessee Williams
’s (1911–1983) 1955 play
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:
“One of those no-neck monsters hit me with some ice cream.” Maggie says of the children in the house: “Their fat little heads sit on their fat little bodies without a bit of connection . . . you can’t wring their necks if they got no necks to wring.”

NON-ISM.
The practice of prefacing a word with
non
—perhaps the ultimate example of a nonce word created by
James Thurber
in the December 1961
Harper’s
magazine. “There is non-fiction and non non-fiction . . . Speaking of nonism: the other day . . . the
Paris Herald Tribune
wrote, ‘The non-violence became noisier.’” Non-ism is also used to mean a non-ideology. Although Thurber did not hyphenate the term, it has passed into wider use with a hyphen.

NYMPHET.
Coined by Russian American novelist
Vladimir Nabokov
(1899–1977) for his novel
Lolita:
“Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets.’”

NYMPHOMANIACAL.
Of excessive sexual desire in and behavior by a female. The noun was turned into play as an adjective by
Aldous Huxley
in his 1923 novel
Antic Hay:
“When I call my lover a nymphomaniacal dog, she runs the penknife into my arm.”

O

ODYSSEY.
A long and eventful or adventurous journey or experience. An allusion to
Homer
’s epic poem describing the travels of Odysseus during his ten years of wandering after the sack of Troy. He eventually returned home to Ithaca and killed the suitors who had plagued his wife, Penelope, during his absence.
Homer was the first writer to dabble in epic poetry for which there is a written record.

OMBIBULOUS.
H. L. Mencken
’s word for someone who drinks everything. “I am ombibulous.” Mencken wrote of himself, “I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.”

ONE FELL SWOOP.
It appears in
Shakespeare
’s
Macbeth
: “What! all my pretty chickens and their dame /At one fell swoop?” laments Macduff in act 4, scene 3, upon learning his wife and children have been killed by Macbeth. This appears to be the earliest recorded use of the phrase, although it may have been in common usage before Shakespeare wrote it down. Michael Quinion, on his website World Wide Words, notes that an audience in Shakespeare’s day would have immediately pictured “a falcon plummeting out of the sky to snatch its prey.”

ONE UP/ONE-UPMANSHIP.
See
GAMESMANSHIP.

OXBRIDGE.
Originally a fictional university introduced in British novelist
William Makepeace Thackery
’s novel
Pendennis
: “‘Rough and ready, your chum seems,’ the Major said. ‘Somewhat different from your dandy friends at Oxbridge.’” Later it was taken as a composite for Oxford and Cambridge as a way of distinguishing those two universities from other British universities.
¹

OZ.
A fictional city and land in the 1900 children’s fantasy
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, by
L. Frank Baum
. Later, and most notably after the 1939 film version of the book, it referred to any place thought to resemble the land or city of Oz, especially any fantastic, ideal, or imaginary domain. The
OED
credits American writer Hart Crane as the first to extend the application of the name to a domain other than Baum’s original. “It [
sc.
Tepoztlán, Mexico] was truly the Land of Oz, with the high valley walls in the Wizard’s circle.”

Oz is also slang for Australia. This is not only because of the allusion to the book and movie but because when Australia is referred to informally with its first three letters it becomes Aus. When Aus or Aussie, the short form for an Australian, is pronounced for fun with a hissing sound at the end, it sounds like the spelling Oz.
²

P

PAGE 99 TEST.
English novelist, poet, critic, and editor
Ford Madox Ford
(1873–1939) often recommended that readers not judge a book by its beginning pages. Instead he advised that readers “open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” The idea has been carried forth in the website Page99Test.com, which offers (courageous) authors and aspiring authors the chance to upload the ninety-ninth pages of their works and invite readers to comment on whether they would buy, or like to read, the rest.

PANDEMONIUM.
For book 1 of his epic poem
Paradise Lost,
published in 1667,  
John Milton
invented
Pandemonium
—from the Greek
pan
(all), and
daimon
(evil spirit), literally “a place for all the demons”—or as Milton first expressed in the poem: “A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandæmonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers.” Later in the work he calls it the “citie and proud seat of Lucifer.” By the end of the century, Pandemonium had become a synonym not just for hell, but, because the devils created a lot of noise, the meaning of
pandemonium,
now lowercased, was broadened to mean “uproar and tumult.” In 1828 Edward Bulwer-Lytton applied it to a common location: “We found ourselves in that dreary pandaemonium . . . a Gin-shop.” Today the term is applied to any scene of disarray, confusion, or even heightened activity as in the headline:
ipad pandemonium
.
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