Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (4 page)

The label was so popular that it soon spawned
babbittess, babbitian, babbittism, babbitless
, and
babbitry
. Alfred H. Holt points out in
Phrase Origins
: “Curiously enough, an earlier Babbitt, a real one, had given a word to the language, the name of a metal alloy he had invented.”
²

BACRONYM.
A name so constructed that its acronym fits an existing word. The author of the term was retired navy commander and word hobbyist
Meredith G. Williams
(1924–2012) of Potomac, Maryland, who won the November 1983 contest for neologisms run by the
Washington Post.
The newspaper quoted Williams, who said it was the “same as an acronym, except that the words were chosen to fit the letters.” A classic example of this is the Apgar score used to rate the health of newborns. It was initially named for Virginia Apgar who developed the test. But a decade later the bacronym APGAR was created in the United States as a mnemonic learning aid listing the key variables in the test: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration.

BAD-MOUTH.
To abuse verbally. Introduced by American writer and humorist
James Thurber
(1894–1961)
in the April 5, 1941, 
Saturday Evening Post
: “He bad-mouthed everybody.”

BAD SEED.
An evil child or person whose evilness is innate. The term is the title of the 1955 play by
Maxwell Anderson
(1888–1959) based on a book by William March about a little girl who murders as recreation. In both the novel and the play the evil child survives but when the film was made in 1956 by director Mervyn LeRoy, the Hays Code was still in effect—which dictated that crime could not pay—and the evil child is killed by a bolt of lightning.

BANANA REPUBLIC.
A politically unstable, undemocratic, and tropical nation whose economy is largely dependent on the export of a single limited-resource product, such as a fruit or a mineral. The pejorative term was coined by
O. Henry
in his 1904 collection of short stories entitled
Cabbages and Kings,
which he wrote in Honduras while he was evading embezzlement charges in the United States. He later went to jail for his crime.
³

As John Soluri points out in his book
Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States
,
“The tragically powerful metaphor has served as both an explanation of and a justification for the political conflicts, poverty, and U.S. interventions that were at the center of twentieth-century Central American history. Paradoxically, many people in the United States have distanced themselves from Central America by using bananas—the very commodity that has linked the two regions for more than a century—as a symbol for ‘corrupt,’ ‘backward,’ and ‘underdeveloped’ societies.”
⁴

BARDOLATRY.
Worship of Shakespeare. A term of derision, it was created by Irish dramatist
George Bernard Shaw
(1856–1950) in 1901. Shaw followed it up with
bardolator
in 1903 and
bardolatrous
in 1905. His commentary on Shakespeare is voluminous and almost always negative—e.g., “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.”
⁵

BARNACULAR.
The quality of officialese coined by British journalist and man of letters
Ivor Brown
(1891–1974), who based the term “on the Dickensian family of Tite Barnacles who clung with such tenacity to official posts.”

BASE BALL.
A bat and ball game whose name is written as two words, a construction that is seldom used today but was dominant in the nineteenth century when it was introduced by
Jane Austen
(1775–1817) in
Northanger Abbey
, written in 1798 or 1799 but published in December 1817: “It was not very wonderful that Catherine [Morland], who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books.”

Although Austen appears to be the first to use the term in a literary context, a more recent discovery made by baseball historian David Block shows an even earlier allusion to the game in print. In 2013 Block discovered a 264-year-old English newspaper called the
Whitehall Evening-Post
. The issue of the newpaper in question has news of inmates attempting a jailbreak from Newgate Prison, and of a chestnut mare that disappeared from a local forest. On page 3, there is a small item. It reads:

On Tuesday last his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and Lord Middlesex, played at Base-Ball, at Walton in Surry; and notwithstanding the Weather was extreme bad, they continued playing for several Hours.

The date of the game was September 12, 1749.
⁶

BEAST WITH TWO BACKS.
Shakespeare
’s own copulatory metaphor, which debuts in
Othello
, act 1, scene 1: “I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.”

BEAT GENERATION.
A group of young people, mostly writers and artists, who created a school of unconventional, nonconformist art, music, and writing. Their self-stereotype was antifashion and favored black clothing. One of their number,
John Clellon Holmes
(1926–1988), wrote of the term in the
New York Times Magazine
in November 1952: “It was the face of a Beat Generation . . . It was
[Jack] Kerouac . . .
who . . . several years ago . . . said, ‘You know, this is really a
beat
generation.’  The origins of the word beat are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than the feeling of weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind.” Later Holmes reported that Kerouac added, “Beat means beatitude not beat up.”
⁷

BEATNIK.
Term
created by
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist
Herb Caen
(1916–1997)
in his column of April 2, 1958, about a party for “50 beatniks.” Caen was later quoted, “I coined the word ‘beatnik’ simply because Russia’s
Sputnik
satellite was aloft at the time and the word popped out.” The word caught on immediately with the public, which was looking for a word to describe this new breed of bohemians. Jack Kerouac, among others who used the term
beat
to describe themselves, did not like
beatnik
. Kerouac told biographer Ann Charters that he was “King of the Beats, but I’m not a Beatnik.”
⁸

In his book on American youth slang,
Flappers 2 Rappers
, Tom Dalzell says, “
Beatnik
must be considered one of the most successful intentionally coined slang terms in the realm of 20th century American English.
Sputnik
/beatnik led to a host of variations including
neatnik
, someone who is well dressed and well groomed;
Vietnik
, someone opposed to the war in Vietnam; and
peacenik
, for individuals who were antiwar. However, the term
no-goodnik
, a good-for-nothing, was coined by American humorist
S. J. Perelman
(1904–1979) in the
New Yorker
magazine in 1936.

BEDAZZLED.
To be irresistibly enchanted, dazed, or pleased. A word that
Shakespeare
debuts in
The Taming of the Shrew
, act 4, scene 5: “Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes, that have been so bedazzled with the sun that everything I look on seemeth green.” Several of the websites that track the Bard’s word have, in recent years, commented on the fact that a commercial product called the Bedazzler had come on the market and was usurping some of the dazzle from this word. The Bedazzler is a plastic device used to attach rhinestones to blue jeans, baseball caps, and other garments. One site commented, “A word first used to describe the particular gleam of sunlight is now used to sell rhinestone-embellished jeans.”

BETTER HALF.
Term for the female of the species coined by nineteenth-century feminist
Mary Livermore
(1820–1905) in her book
On the Sphere and Influence of Women
: “Regarding her as I do as the better half of humanity—with a more delicate and sensitive nature than man—with a more refined and spiritual organization—woman should be the conservator of public morals.”
⁹

BIBLE BELT.
A derogatory label coined in 1925 by
H. L. Mencken
(1880–1956) following his coverage of the Scopes “monkey” trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Mencken applied the term to areas of the United States that were dominated by people who believed the Bible was literally true. While Mencken did not assign a specific geographic area to the term, he did use it for the rural areas of the Midwest and the South. He once designated Jackson, Mississippi, as the heart of both the Bible and Lynching Belts.
¹⁰