Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (21 page)

Chewing  Tobacco package label showing Romeo and Juliet embracing, by an open window, as they are taking leave of each other.

ROOMSCANITIS.
An affliction of some partygoers that makes their eyes flit about looking for someone more interesting or less dull than the one they are talking to. Created by
John H. Corcoran Jr.
, who introduced it in an article in the
Washingtonian
magazine in 1975.

RUNCIBLE.
Word of uncertain meaning that
Edward Lear
(1812–1888) used to modify such words as
hat,
cat,
goose,
and
spoon.
It is first employed in 1870 in the poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” in
Poetry for Young People
:
“They dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon.” In the January 11, 1913, issue of the
Emporia (Kansas) Gazette,
William Allen White wrote of the word’s creator: “Lear . . . was a dear, delicious, crotchety, runcible man, to use one of his own words.”

S

SAD SACK.
General term for a misfit. From the name for a cartoon character created for
Yank
magazine by American cartoonist
George Baker
(1915–1975) in 1942 for a hapless and blundering army private.
¹

SALAD DAYS.
The term originates in
Shakespeare
’s
Antony and Cleopatra:

My salad days,

When I was green in judgment.

SANDWICH BOARDS.
An advertising sign consisting of two placards fastened together at the top with straps supported on the shoulders of the carrier, or sandwich man. Term created or at least so described in print by
Charles Dickens
,
who described these advertisers as “a piece of human flesh between two slices of paste board.”

SCAREDY-CAT.
A timid person; a coward.
Introduced in 1933 by US author
Dorothy Parker
in a short story “The Waltz” with this line: “Oh, yes, do let’s dance together. It’s so nice to meet a man who isn’t scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri.”

Dorothy Parker

SCIENTIST.
The word
was
coined in 1840 by the
Rev. William Whewell
(1794–1866) in his book
The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,
which contained a seventy-page section on the Language of Science. In it he discusses how the new words of science should be constructed. He then coins the universally accepted term
physicist
, remarking that the existing term
physician
cannot be used in that sense. He then moves on to the larger concept. “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist.” The word that
scientist
replaced was
philosopher
. An account of this coinage in
Word Study
, a newsletter published by Merriam-Webster in 1948, noted: “Few deliberately invented words have gained such wide currency, and many people will be surprised to learn that it is just over a century old.”
²

SCROLLOPING.
Characterized by or possessing heavy, florid ornament. Also proceeding in involutions, rambling. A creation of
Virginia Woolf.

SCROOGE.
A meanspirited miserly person; a skinflint. After the character Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s 1843 story “A Christmas Carol.” It was only with the worldwide popularity of Dickens’s story—often performed as a play—that the name of the character began to be used allegorically. The first example from the
OED
is 1940.

SEMANTICS.
The branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning is a concept and a term created by
Michel Bréal
(1832–1915), a professor of comparative grammar in Paris, who coined the word in the title of his 1895
Essai de sémantique (sciencedes significations)
. He also created the modern marathon for the relaunched Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the same event that has enjoyed worldwide popularity ever since.
³

SEMORDNILAP.
A word that spells another word in reverse. It is the creation of American writer
Willard R. Espy
(1910–1999), who made it by spelling
palindromes
backward. A palindrome is, of course, a word, phrase, or passage that spells the same thing forward as backward. Some choice
semordnilaps
:
straw
,
reknits
,
doom
, and
repaid
. Some trademarks are semiordnilaps: Serutan is intentional, whereas Tums probably is not. One can make the case that if we have gone far enough to accept semordnilap, we can go one step further to embrace
quasisemordnilap
for words that come close to spelling something else backward. A good example is
air raid.

SERENDIPITY.
The writer and politician
Horace Walpole (
1717–1797) invented the word in 1754 as an allusion to Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka. Walpole was a prolific letter writer, and he explained to one of his main correspondents that he had based the word on the title of a fairy tale,
The Three Princes of Serendip
.
The three princes were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of. The wonderfully onomatopoeic
serendipity,
which is indeed often chosen as Britons’ favorite English word when such surveys are taken (alongside nincompoop and discombobulate), means the making of happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Incidentally, the original Persian name for Sri Lanka (and in earlier times Ceylon) was Sarandib, a corruption of the Sanskrit name Sinhala Dvipa
which literally meant “the island where lions dwell.” Sinhalese, or Sinhala, is still the name of one of Sri Lanka’s national languages, the other being Tamil.

Walpole holds the honor of writing the first gothic novel,
The Castle of Otranto
, in 1765. It was suggested by a dream he had had and of which “all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine, filled with Gothic story), and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.”

SHAKEN NOT STIRRED.
Proper method for making a perfect martini in the orthodoxy of James Bond, the superspy who was created by
Ian Fleming
and operating under the code name 007. The rule was in direct contrast to W. Somerset Maugham’s dictum that “martinis should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously one on top of the other.” Bond ordered his
shaken, not stirred
, which he claimed created a colder martini and was the key to avoiding “bruising the gin.” In the first installment of the series of Bond novels,
Casino Royale,
007 doles out specific instructions to the barman on how to prepare his drink, a cocktail that would later become known as the Vesper, after double agent Vesper Lynd. The recipe: three measures of Gordon’s gin, one measure of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, with a slice of lemon—shaken. He explains after first ordering the drink: “I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold, and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I think of a good name.”
⁴
*

SHOOT ONESELF IN THE FOOT.
In the metaphoric sense of making one’s own situation worse. This expression was first used in this sense by anthropologist
William White Howells
(1908-2005) in his 1959 book on human evolution called
Mankind in the Making
: “Certain common useful phrases can be dangerous . . . Like guns, they will do the right thing in the right hands, but they are loaded, and ordinary citizens without Ph.D.’s are not the only ones who have accidents with them. Many a specialist has shot himself in the foot when he thought he was only cleaning a paragraph.”
⁵

SHOTGUN WEDDING.
A wedding made in haste or under duress by reason of the bride’s pregnancy. The term and the concept were introduced in print by
Sinclair Lewis
in 1927 in his novel
Elmer Gantry
: “There were, in those parts and those days, not infrequent ceremonies known as ‘shotgun weddings.’”
⁶

SIGNIFICA.
Term created by
Irving Wallace
(1916–1990), his daughter,
Amy
, and his son,
David Wallechinsky
, for “unusual or little-known facts which have too much significance to qualify as mere trivia.”

SILENT SPRING.
A metaphor for environmental disaster from the title of the 1962 book of the same title by American marine biologist and conservationist
Rachel Carson
(1907–1964). She predicted a spring without songbirds if the food chain was destroyed by the unrestrained use of pesticides and herbicides. Carson’s book became one of the rallying points for the nascent environmental movement.

SLAM DUNK.
Coined in 1972 by Los Angeles Lakers basketball broadcaster
Chick Hearn
(1916–2002) for a basketball shot that is performed when a player jumps in the air and manually powers the ball downward through the basket with one or both hands over the rim.

SLOUGH OF DESPOND.
A bout of deep depression—either personal or societal. A
slough
(rhymes with cow) is a muddy, dark bog into which humans wander and get stuck and
despond
is a state of despondency. English Christian writer and preacher
John Bunyan
(1628–1688) introduced the phrase in
Pilgrim’s Progress,
where it was a hazard experienced by Everyman, the main character, on his pilgrimage to the Celestial City.

SMILET.
A half smile. A coinage of
William Shakespeare
that debuts with these lines in the fourth act, scene 3, of
King Lear
:

Those happy
smilets
,

That play’d on her ripe lip, seem’d not to know