The history of moron is told briefly in AL4, pp. 174–75. There are more details in the following letter from Dr. Henry H. Goddard, who coined it:
In 1909 the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded met at Chippewa Falls, Wis. As the result of some discussion of the various terms used to designate the mental defective, a committee was appointed to report the next year on the classification of the feebleminded. The committee consisted of Dr. Walter Fernald, chairman, another member whose name I forget, and myself.
When I returned to Vineland,1 I set to work on the classification so as to have something ready when Dr. Fernald should call for suggestions. The matter must have slipped his mind because he never called for anything on the subject.
At that time I was enthusiastic over the results of the Binet tests. We had classified all our cases at Vineland in accordance with the tests and it worked wonderfully. It was therefore an easy matter to classify our lowest grade as idiots with a mental age of from birth to 2 years; the next group as imbeciles ranging from mental age 3 years to 7. The highest group would include mental ages from 8 years to 12. I thought first to call them feebleminded, as is the English custom, but when I recalled that practically every institution for mental defectives in the United States was called an Institution for the Feebleminded, it was evident the word was already established as a generic term for the entire group.
Therefore it became necessary to discover a new term. Idiot and imbecile are both Greek. A Greek word would make it uniform. But I could think of none. I appealed to my friends and got many suggestions, all the way from deviates to the almosts! One day there dropped into my mind a relic of my college days in the form of the rhetorical term oxymoron, with its interesting etymology, “sharp-foolish”; then I thought of sophomore — the “wise fool.” Turning to my Greek lexicon, I found moros — mora — moron, “dull, stupid, silly, foolish” a perfect description of our 8–12 year-group.
When the Association met the next year — May, 1910 — at Lincoln, Ill., I happened to be the only member of the classification committee present. When this was discovered and it was learned that I had a plan which I had intended to offer to Dr. Fernald, I was asked to present it to the association for their information and to show that the committee had done something. To my surprise the meeting voted to accept the proposed classification.
The new word was accepted rather quickly by students of and workers with the feebleminded and very quickly by the public. Writers and the general public seem to have stretched its meaning somewhat to cover any case of mental dullness, whether such person would be technically feebleminded or not. That of course is not unusual in our language and is not particularly objectionable.2
The extension of meaning mentioned by Dr. Goddard has been accompanied by a change of meaning, especially in the Chicago area. There a moron has come to mean a sexual pervert, and its use in its correct sense has overtones of libel.1 Moron is the name of a character in Molière’s play, “La Princesse d’Elide,” first played May 8, 1664, and this Moron, by a happy coincidence, is a fool, but his name was not in Dr. Goddard’s mind when moron was coined.2 Nor was he aware, I take it, that Moroni figures in the Book of Mormon as the son of Mormon and the author of about half of the text thereof, and that his name is not infrequently bestowed upon Mormon boys — or was, at least, until the entrance of moron into the language gave it an embarrassing significance. Moron has been taken into English, and begins to show itself in other languages. The English ament, used to designate all three classes of the feeble-minded, is seldom used in America.3
Not many other deliberate inventions have had the success of moron and sundae, but new ones are coming in all the time, and some of them are supported by ardent advocacy, e.g., americanity, coined by Dr. F. M. Kercheville, head of the department of modern languages at the University of New Mexico, to designate “the broad but none the less profound concept of the genuine spirit — the fundamental elements and characteristics — common to all the Americas.”4 In such matters, as in kissing, success goes by favor, and the overwhelming majority of the new words thrown out by ingenious neologists do not catch on. Gelett Burgess, whose launching of bromide and blurb has been noted, proposed many others in “Burgess Unabridged,” 1914, but they failed to make their way into the language. Gwibit, dedicated to the nation by Congressman Karl E. Mundt, of South Dakota in 1943 to designate “the guild of Washington incompetent bureaucratic idea throat-cutters,” seemed to meet a need, but it nevertheless died the death.5 When Dr. Charles H. Grandgent offered osteocephic as an elegant substitute for bonehead he seemed to be performing a public service, but it went unrequited by acceptance,1 and the same fate befell my own less couth osseocaput, launched in 1913, along with lithocaput, ferrocaput and various other analogues. Will coolant make its way? It seems to be an excellent and necessary word, but its fate is hidden in the bosoms of the gods.2 Nor is there any certainty about what is in store for lapkin, the name of a newly-invented napkin with a button-hole in one corner, to anchor it to coat or waistcoat and prevent it sliding to the floor.3 Nor about the destiny of homancing, meaning house-hunting, and homancier, meaning “one skilled in home financing.”4 At not infrequent intervals some newspaper or magazine editor, struck with the thought that the vocabulary of the American language, despite its unparalleled richness, still has gaps in it, calls upon his readers to apply themselves to the invention of new words. Such an inspiration seized C. K. Ogden, then science editor of the Forum, in 1927, and he invited contributions to “the language of tomorrow,” either original or dredged up from the current stream.5 There was a hearty response, and a great many new words were suggested, e.g., souprano (a noisy eater of soup), to vacueat (to eat spaghetti by suction), crool (the wind in a forest), pneumocrat (a man of great spiritual influence), megaphonia (the habit of talking too loud), wild-craft, fieldsome, hallusion (hallucination and illusion) and scheme-stress, but though some of them were ingenious and amusing they all failed to survive. Deliberate efforts to resuscitate obsolete words are also made from time to time, but they seldom succeed.6
There was a transient craze in the second lustrum of the 30s for nouns on the order of maker-upper, compounded of a verb and an adverb, with -er added to each. A somewhat similar fashion, in the days before the Civil War, had produced such forms as come-outer, traced by the DAE to 1840, and come-uppance, traced to 1859, but this new one was wilder and woolier, and some of the examples reported by Louise Pound and other contributors to American Speech were curious indeed, e.g., fighter-backer; passer-byer; caller-, jotter-, (shirt) holder-, sitter-, and tearer-downer; dropper-, filler- and taker-inner; putter- and topper-offer; diner-, finder-, holder-, putter- and worker-outer; and bracer-, breaker-, checker-, freshener-, giver-, (sock) holder-, maker-, pepper-, putter-, setter-, snapper-, stayer-, summer-, waker- and warmer–upper.1 A round-up of some of the most picturesque examples was attempted by Harold Wentworth in American Speech in 1936,2 and he assembled a number of genuine monstrosities, e.g., lobby-drifter-througher, dance-mixer-upper, home-breaker-upper, haircut-putter-offer, and builder-upper-tearer-downer. He said:
Newspaper columnists’ and college students’ language furnished more than half of the data adduced.… Of the six adverbs involved, up occurs about twice as often as out, in, off, down and through combined.… Why the evil genius of slang permits -er, but not -ing or -ed, to be so misused is puzzling. Forms like calling-downing, thinking-upping, dropped-inned and walked-upped have not been observed.
In 1940 Dr. Pound reported3 that “the vogue of locutions of the picker-upper, filler-inner type has now mostly subsided.”4 Hair-do came in during their heyday and was followed by up-do. A series of terms in walk- is older: walk-around is traced by the DAE to 1869 and walk-out to 1888, and walk-up, an apartment without elevator service, is traced by the NED Supplement to 1919, but probably goes back to the late years of the last century. The contagion spread to the adjectives, and some bizarre superlatives were concocted,
e.g., getting-aroundest, datingest, most-workingest,5 and homer-lessest (of a baseball pitcher who held down the opposing clubs to eight home-runs in a season).6 But like the parent fashion, this one soon died away.
3. VERBS
Verbs made of nouns unchanged are numerous in American English, and hundreds of new ones seem to be made every year, but they are by no means new to the language. Since the early Middle English period, indeed, they have constituted one of the chief evidences of that almost complete abandonment of inflections which separates English from the other principal languages of the Indo-European family. Its nouns, save for the addition of s in the plural and of ’s in the genitive, are the same in all situations, and many of them may be turned into verbs without any modification whatever, e.g., place and to place. To be sure, a number of suffixes are still in use to notify the change — e.g., -ize and -fy, as in carbon, to carbonize; beauty, to beautify —, but often they are not necessary, and when they are used to make new verbs it is usually only because (at any rate in the opinion of the verb-maker) they promote euphony. Many of the most common English verbs are borrowed nouns, and go back to a very early time, e.g., to ground. The thing also runs the other way, and such verbs are matched by large numbers of common nouns that began as verbs, e.g., sleep and walk. The process is going on constantly, and in both directions, but it is naturally most active at times when the language is in one of its recurrent stages of vigorous growth and radical change, and in circles wherein there is least respect for established forms and hence least resistance to innovation. One can hardly ask an Oxford don to accept complacently such a novelty as to contact, for it offends all his notions of linguistic order and decorum, but the average American, having only the faintest concept of order and decorum in that field, takes it almost as a matter of course. As we have seen, the same thing was true, in the age of Shakespeare, of the average Englishman, and even of the superior Englishman, and in consequence it was a time of bold and often barbaric experiment in language, and some of the novelties it produced were so extravagant that even the American of today finds them somewhat excessive, or as he would probably say, ultra. You will find a large number of them listed in E. A. Abott’s “Shakespearean Grammar,”1 many falling into the class of verbs made of nouns. Shakespeare did not hesitate to use to happy, to barn, to child, to climate, to disaster, to fame, to furnace, to lesson, to malice, to property and to verse. Some of his innovations, e.g., to fever and to fool, made their way into the language and are questioned by no one today, but others died quickly, for there is a large turnover in such novelties, and no one can ever predict the ultimate fate of a given example.
One of the newcomers that seems destined to stick is to contact. The DAE does not list it, no doubt because it did not appear until after 1900, but the NED Supplement traces it to 1929 and marks it “U.S.” It was preceded by the addition of a new sense to the old noun contact, given by Partridge as “an acquaintance (ship), a connection, both with a view to business or self-interest.” This new sense, he says, appeared in the United States at some time before 1925, and is (1938) “fast verging on Standard English, at least the Standard English of trade.” The verb came in soon afterward, and on September 8, 1928 the Editor and Publisher was noting its employment by an advertising executive. It apparently made relatively slow progress at the start, but after a couple of years it was in wide and indeed almost general use,1 and soon afterward got to England. There it met with a hostile reception from purists, and so recently as 1939 the London Times Literary Supplement was bracketing it with to peeve and declaring the two “do not exist in reputable English,”2 but this was hardly more than whistling in the dark, for the London News Review, which specializes in introducing Americanisms to England, had used it in a headline three years before,3 and a year later Ivor Brown, writing in the Manchester Guardian,4 was throwing up his hands. “The war,” he said,
through the power it gives to bureaucracy and to the industrialist turned administrator, will certainly add to our language — or rather inflate it. The tendency of such people is always to prefer a new and heavy word to an old and short one. Instead of bidding us meet their Mr. Smith in Birmingham, they would have us contact him. In doing this they are following a habit particularly dear to the American — that is, to take a noun belonging to a verb and then turn that noun into another and longer verb. The most absurd and offensive example of this is the use of the word to decision. Decide is not nearly swollen enough for the swollen-headed Napoleon of a film corporation. “Have you decisioned this?” he inquires with a happy illusion of appearing the educated man.
Mr. Brown’s contention that in all the situations where to contact was being used the ancient to meet would suffice was not shared by other English observers. In 1941, an anonymous writer in the Cheshire Observer,1 in noting its adoption by British Army headquarters in Greece, lamented that there was “no precise one-word substitute for it.” It was attacked, in the 30s, in the United States as well as in England, and in 1931, as I have recorded in AL4,2 one of the high officials of the Western Union denounced it as a “hideous vulgarism” and forbade its use by employés of the company. But they continued to use it, and are still using it today, and so are multitudes of other Americans. Early in 1937 there was a brief, inglorious war upon it in the correspondence columns of the New York Times, but its opponents were put to rout under date of February 13 by Jacques W. Redway, of Mount Vernon, N. Y., who pointed out sensibly that every attack upon to contact was also an attack upon to harness, to bridle, to saddle and even to rain, to hail, to snow and to thunder. More than a year later the New Republic called it “dreadful,”3 but Westbrook Pegler and others replied at once that to implement, then a counter-word among Liberals, including especially the editors of the New Republic, had no more support in logic.4 To this the editors made the fatuous reply that to implement was “perfectly good English,” and had been so “since the days of Walter Scott.” In other words, they set up the tests of age and general acceptance, which would have barred out to implement itself when it was first launched. Finally, they crowned their confusion by advising their critics to “consult Webster’s or the Concise Oxford Dictionary,” apparently unaware that the verb had been listed in Webster’s New International since 1934, in the NED Supplement, the big sister of the Concise Oxford, since 1933, and in the Standard Dictionary since 1931.5
Not a few of the more recent verbs-from-nouns meet genuine needs, and deserve to be treated with more seriousness than they usually get, e.g., to thumb (a ride), to audition,1 to co-star,2 to curb (take a dog to the curb),3 to secretary,4 to cystoscope (and its numerous medical analogues), to stench,5 to debut,6 to deadhead, to highlight, to intern,7 to model,8 to service,9 to alert,10 to message,11 to vacation,1 to special,2 to package, to press-agent, to research, to pressure,3 to accession,4 to sabotage, to remainder (unsalable books), to panic,5 to recess,6 to waste basket,7 to grand-marshal,8 to momentum,9 to referee,10 to chairman,11 to alibi, to baton,12 to onion,13 to gavel,14 to bombshell,1 to submarine,2 to architect,3 to solo, to pancake, to jimcrow, to belly-ache, to pussy-foot, to sidetrack (traced by the DAE to 1881), to headquarter, to patrioteer, to loudspeaker,4 to chamoise,5 to first-name, to night-club, to sherlock,6 to clearance,7 to Book-of-the-Month,8 to mastermind,9 to blueprint,10 to needle,11 to cold deck,12 to night-raid,13 and to gift-price14
This list might be extended almost indefinitely, especially if I included citations from the iconoclastic vocabulary of Variety, some of which have gone into the common stock. A few of its characteristic inventions will suffice: to ash-can, to angel, to showcase, to baritone, to background, to questionnaire, to music, to guest, to pact, to biography, to bankroll, to clipper,15 to premier (often shortened to to preem), to option, to commentator and to barnum. Variety frequently reduces verb phrases to simple verbs, e.g., to ready for to make ready,1 to siesta for to take a siesta, to train for to go by train, and to outlet for to serve as an outlet. Rather curiously, it also affects a number of new a
nd clumsy verbs, made from nouns, that are not nearly so vivid as the old verbs they displace, e.g., to decision for to decide,2 to author for to write,3 to signature for to sign,4 to theft for to steal,1 to gift for to give,2 to guest for to entertain,3 and to destruct for to destroy. Such forms are by no means confined to the vocabulary of Variety. Walter Winchell and his disciples produce them in large number, and they are also plentiful in presumably more decorous circles. I have encountered to teacher in a learned journal of Florida4 and it seems to have countenance in other parts of the South. Indeed, the manufacture of such new verbs goes on on all levels. To letter, probably suggested by to major, is used in the colleges to indicate a choice in physical training, e.g., “He lettered in wrestling,”5 and I cherish “a town poised on the borderland between North and South, sourced by French and Swedish and German and plain English stock,” found in an advertisement of “Jordanstown,” by Josephine Johnson, published in 1937 by Simon and Schuster. I reach into my collectanea and bring forth to air (to disseminate by radio), to wax (to record for the phonograph), to postcard, to canary (to sing), to doghouse, to true-bill (to indict), to blurb, to statistic (and to outstatistic), to bum’s rush,6 to lumber-wagon, to landslide, to dead-heat, to picture-peddle, to front-page, to hostess, to by-line, to conquest, to roadster, to cafe, to highwayman, to trailer, to lyric (to write the lyrics for a musical piece), to brain-trust, and to third-degree.7 Nor are the English altogether out of the running, though the wild exuberance of fancy that marked them in the age of Elizabeth has now been transferred to the United States. I find to stonewall in no less decorous a London journal than the Morning Post,1 to partner in a highly respectable provincial paper,2 to town-plan in the austere Edinburgh Scotsman,3 and a revival of the archaic to servant in the Countryman.4 Whether to park, in its current senses, originated in England or in the United States is in dispute. It was borrowed from the French early in the Nineteenth Century to indicate the storing of artillery, and was taken into the vocabulary of automobilists c. 1910. Since then it has been extended in meaning to indicate any deposit of an object that must be kept safely, and Americans park not only their automobiles but also their dogs, their children and their consciences.5 Another verb whose provenance is uncertain is to streamline. The NED Supplement traces it in English use to 1913, but it was probably in use in the United States earlier, though the DAE does not list it. It came into popularity c. 1937,6 and was greatly extended in meaning, so that it now designates any attempt at simplification. On January 10, 1944 it appeared in H. J. Res. 211, introduced in the House of Representatives by the Hon. Frank Carlson of Kansas, and so became official.7
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