Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (22 page)

What guests were in her eyes.

This is one of Shakespeare’s words that never became popular. Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke argued for its wider adoption in
The Shakespeare Key:
“We owe to Shakespeare’s need of an expressive and poetical word in this passage, descriptive of a tender daughter struggling with her tears and striving to retain patient submission amid her sorrow, the beautiful diminutive ‘smilets,’ which so well designates attempted smiles, half smiles.”
⁷

SMIRT.
The title of a 1934 novel by
James Branch Cabell
(1879–1958) that the author saw as a fresh expletive. He explained, “There was never any name so impertinent and insulting in sound. It ought to be an invaluable addition to the list of Anglo-Saxon epithets, and if it isn’t obscene, it certainly sounds like it.” According to the March 1934 issue of
Vanity Fair
,
it is supposed to have taken the author two years to think of the title.

SMUTHOUND.
Term created by
H. L. Mencken
for censor, “a word superbly suited for expectoration” according to Robert McHugh, editor of
The Bathtub Hoax, and Other Blasts and Bravos from the
Chicago Tribune.
⁸

SNOB.
There are three separate meanings of this term: (1) a cobbler or cobbler’s assistant; (2) a person who imitates, fawningly admires, or vulgarly seeks association with those regarded as social superiors; and (3) a person who tends to rebuff, avoid, or ignore those regarded as inferior. The first meaning is of obscure origin but the other two are prime authorisms. The meaning of snob was coined by
William Makepeace Thackeray
and used in his satirical
Book of Snobs.
 “I mean by positive [Snobs], such persons as are Snobs everywhere . . . being by nature endowed with Snobbishness.” As for the snob who looks down on others, that usage was introduced in 1911 in George Bernard Shaw’s
Getting Married
: “All her childish affectations of conscientious scruple and religious impulse have been applauded and deferred to until she has become an ethical snob of the first water.”

SOLD DOWN THE RIVER.
To suffer a great betrayal; to be destroyed by the bad faith of another, especially one who you trusted. The exact term and the action from which the metaphor derives is from
Harriet Beecher Stowe
’s (1811–1896)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
which describes in heartrending detail the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families who were actually sold to plantations farther down the Mississippi River where conditions were harsher. The term existed before Stowe used it but she infused it with a sense of tragedy and betrayal.
⁹

SPACE.
John Milton
, who visited Galileo in 1638, was also the first writer to ever use the word
space
, in the sense of
outer space
, to consider the infinite scope of the universe. As he wrote in book 8 of
Paradise Lost
:

. . . this earth a spot, a grain,

An atom, with the firmament compared

And all her numbered stars that seem to roll

Space incomprehensible (for such

Their distance argues and their swift return

Diurnal).
¹⁰

SPARROW FART.
A person or thing of no consequence.
James Joyce
wrote about Penelope in
Ulysses,
episode 18: “Miss This Miss That Miss the other lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside.” It is a word that is rarely used but can be employed to great effect as in this line from Kurt Vonnegut’s
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
“The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls yet to be born.” It should be added that the term
duck fart
is a baseball term for a bloop single. The term was coined by Chicago White Sox announcer
Ken Harrelson
because the sound made by the ball coming off the bat is presumably similar to how he imagined the sound made by a duck farting (rather than a solid “crack”).

-SPEAK.
Suffix appended to words to denote a specialized way of speaking; a particular jargon or slang. The construction is drawn from
George Orwell
’s
1984
in which there are two languages: Oldspeak, which is English as we know it and Newspeak, which is sterile language that serves the needs of a totalitarian state. The term is introduced in Orwell’s 1949 novel: “Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.”

Hundreds of examples have been created in the wake of Orwell’s neologism, including
Newtspeak
and
Bushspeak,
the later attributed to presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, the former alluding to former U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

SPIFFLICATED.
Intoxicated, drunk. One of close to three thousand known and documented synonyms for drunk, this one is the creation of
O. Henry
and first appears in his 1906 short story collection
The Four Million
: “He uses Nature’s Own Remedy. He gets spifflicated.”

SPINACHY.
Characteristic or suggestive of a dark leafy vegetable. A nonce word created by
Ogden Nash
for a poem in his 1950 collection
Family Reunion
:

So spinach was too spinachy

For Leonardo da Vinaci.

STAGGERMENT.
Great amazement or astonishment that is enough to change one’s gait. It is one of
J. R. R. Tolkien
’s
nonce words.
¹¹

STAR-CROSS’D.
Coined by
William Shakespeare
to describe the young lovers in the prologue to
Romeo and Juliet
:

Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.

The term has come to describe two people whose tragic destinies are intertwined.
Cross’d
has special impact in that it carries and connotes the triple meanings of (1) brought into each other’s path, (2) thwarted, and (3) burdened (as in
a cross to bear
).

STEREOTYPE.
A preconceived and oversimplified notion of the characteristics that typify a person, situation. Stereotype originally was a printing term for a relief printing plate that was cast in a mold made from composed type or an original plate. The word was redefined by American newspaper columnist
Walter Lippmann
(1889–1974) in 1922 in his book
Public Opinion
. He called a stereotype an “intellectual crutch, a substitute for precise analysis and an excuse for not viewing individuals and historical eras singularly, as they actually are.” Lippmann used the term to describe the fixed and harmful images that various European nationalities stubbornly held of each other and that, he believed, helped incline them to go to war. “A stereotype may be so consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact.”
¹²

STRINE.
Coined by
Alistair Morrison
to represent an alleged Australian pronunciation of
Australian
. Writing under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder (echoic of
alphabetical order
) and as professor of strine studies at the University of Sinny (Sydney), Morrison published a series of humorous articles in the
Sydney Morning Herald
, some of which were later collected and published under the title
Let Stalk Strine
in 1965.

STUD MUFFIN.
Term for a sexually attractive male often used with a trace of derogation. It was created by American humorist
Dave Barry
and first included in his syndicated newspaper column January 9, 1986: “In Washington, House and Senate budget conferees agree to call each other by nicknames such as ‘Stud Muffin.’”

STUFFED SHIRT.
American novelist
Willa Cather
’s (1873–1947) term for one who is pompous and conservative, but usually ineffectual. Cather first used it in 1913 in
O Pioneers!:
“He characterized Frank Shabata by a Bohemian expression which is the equivalent of stuffed shirt.”
¹³

SUBTERRANEAN.
The term
subterranean
was used by some to describe the 1950s bohemians. Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel,
The Subterraneans
, is a portrait of the bohemian subculture of New York and San Francisco. Kerouac wrote that the term was a “name invented by Adam Moorad [the name Kerouac used for Allen Ginsberg in
The Subterraneans
] who is a poet and friend of mine,” and that John Clellon Holmes referred to them as “urban Thoreaus.” Appearing at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in 1958, Kerouac said, “And now there are two types of beat hipsters—the Cool: bearded, sitting without moving in cafes, with their unfriendly girls dressed in black, who say nothing, and the Hot: Crazy, talkative, mad shining eyes, running from bar to bar only to be ignored by the cool subterranean.” 

SUINE.
A
James Joyce
nonce word for
piglike
, created for
Ulysses
: “The suine scions of the house of Lambert.”
¹⁴

SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS.
A theory and term created by journalist
Jude Wanniski
(1936–2005) to describe a school of economic theory that stresses the costs of production as a means of stimulating the economy and advocates policies that raise capital and labor output by increasing the incentive to produce. It promotes big tax cuts as the best cure for an ailing economy.

SUPERLAWYER.
The term appeared as the title of a bestselling 1972 book by
Joseph C. Goulden
, who recalls, “As far as I know, I am the first person to use the term in print. During an interview in which a lawyer specializing in transportation issues sought to dispel the notion that Washington attorneys are somehow different—his name has long-since slipped through a crevice in my memory, never to be seen again—told me: ‘All I do, really, is practice law. It’s nothing different from what my Yale classmates do in Boston or Philadelphia or Chicago. I research and write briefs and argue my cases, and try to keep my clients happy, and I cut the grass every second Saturday. I'm not a Superlawyer, I'm not a man who backslaps John Mitchell [then the attorney general] or George Romney [then the governor of Michigan]—hell, the most influential man I've met this year is an assistant secretary of transportation who goes to our church.’  ”