by Alex Horne
Biro: A Hungarian called László József Bíró (can you have too many accents?) invented this word by patenting the innovative non-dripping pen in 1938 (he then sold it to Marcel Bich of Bic fame in 1950).
Blizzard: Definitely one of my top five words, ‘blizzard’ was first used in its meteorological sense in 1870 by an Iowan newspaper editor who decided the term, previously used to mean a series of blows from weapons or fists, would perfectly describe that year’s severe snow.
Blurb: In 1907, a New Yorker called Gelett Burgess publicised his book Are you a Bromide? at a publishing trade association dinner. ‘Bromide’ was his new word for a rather dull, ordinary person (the sort a pratdigger so often unearths), but it was ‘blurb’ that really took off. Instead of the usual drab book covers, he decided to mimic the trashy novels of the day by adorning his own front cover with a particularly buxom blonde whom he christened ‘Miss Belinda Blurb’. Amazed by this dazzling branding, other publishers followed suit and a ‘blurb’ swiftly came to mean (in Burgess’s own words): ‘1. A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.’ Now, of course, it refers to any words, rather than pictures, on the back of a book, an example of which can be seen simply by clapping your paddles together. Burgess attempted to recreate this success with a further book entitled Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed, containing 200 new coinages like ‘flooijab’, ‘an apparent compliment with a concealed sting’; ‘to kipe’, ‘to inspect appraisingly, as women do one another’; and ‘impkin’, ‘a superhuman pet, a baby in beast form’. Each new word was accompanied by a page-long definition and an eight-line poem, but not one made its way into an actual dictionary.
Bob’s Your Uncle: In 1886 the term ‘Bob’s your uncle’ was created when the Prime Minister Robert Cecil appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour Chief Secretary for Ireland in the finest example of verbal nepotism until ‘George is your dad’ in 2000.
Bollo: Unintentionally piggy-backing other usages of the word, most notably in the cult British comedy The Mighty Boosh, Mr Wingdings and his family coined this term one Christmas, early in the twenty-first century.
Boning Up: A second-hand bookseller called Henry George Bohn (1796–1884) worked in London selling cheap translations of the Classics for students (like me) to cram from at the last minute. It may sound unlikely, but there is compelling evidence that the phrase ‘to bone up’ is the result of this man’s trade; yet another hidden eponym, his name is now a verb, his books a stepping stone to the book. The other, more practical meanings of the word are nothing to do with Henry, and I only mention them because I remember once asking my grandmother (the penis from Russia) where my grandfather was. ‘He’s in the kitchen, boning the chicken,’ was her reply. I’ve never been able to get this image out of my head.
Bother: An Irish actor and a contemporary of Samuel Johnson (and a major proponent of the ‘elocution movement’, apparently) called Thomas Sheridan gave the English-speaking world ‘bother’ before his son Richard kindly donated his ‘dressing gown’ (as well as ‘malapropisms’ thanks to Mrs Malaprop in his novel The Rivals).
Brunch: The OED assigns the invention of ‘brunch’ to one Guy Beringer, who first condensed breakfast and lunch in 1895 in a sadly defunct magazine called Hunter’s Weekly.
Catch-22: Joseph Heller created this unusually shaped cracker with his novel of the same name, first published in 1961. An Archbishop called John Morton had expressed the same idea in the phrase ‘to apply Morton’s fork’ back in the fifteenth century, but as with many cutlery-based coinages, it never quite caught on.
Chugger: This word (‘those people who stop you on the street and try to persuade you to give money to good causes’ or ‘charity mugger’) was recently adopted by the charity community in the same way words like ‘queer’ and ‘nigger’ have been reclaimed in the recent past. It was coined, as far as I can tell, in 2002, by ‘the media’ in the UK. But who in the media? Why isn’t the creator shouting his achievement from the rooftops (or at least on the street, next to a chugger)?
Cock and Bull Story: The residents of Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire would have you believe that two of their historic high-street pubs, The Cock and The Bull, were often frequented by travellers who tended to embroider their tales between the two and thus spawned this phrase. They even celebrate this ‘fact’ with their own storytelling festival every year. But this may well be a cock and bull story itself. I would give more credit to the mysterious ancient Greek storyteller, Aesop, who wrote one fable featuring a cock talking to a bull. That sounds unfeasible enough to be a genuine etymology.
Cornucopia: It’s a shame I don’t know any current pamphleteers to help spread my words. Sixteenth-century author (and self-appointed celebrity) Robert Greene wrote a famous pamphlet called Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit, which contained a polemic attack on one Mr Shakespeare that prompted the Bard to immortalise him as his famous fool Falstaff. As well as the marvellous verb ‘to frenchify’, Greene then invented ‘cornucopia’, a word close to my heart because it comes from the Latin meaning ‘horn of plenty’. I’m well aware that this makes me a bit of a nerd, but that sort of thing tickles me. It’s my name! My first Latin teacher christened my little brother ‘Cornetto’ from the same Latin noun. Cornus has always been my favourite Latin word; perhaps that’s why I’m such a fan of ‘corny’ jokes (of which, I suppose, that is one).
Corny: The word ‘corny’ can be traced back to American seed companies which, in the early 1900s, would advertise their goods in catalogues with jokes littered throughout. Unfortunately the quality was so poor that ‘corn catalogue jokes’ became a byword for bad jokes (in much the same way as Christmas cracker jokes today), and eventually the word ‘corny’ was born.
Cromulent: A word meaning ‘fine’ or ‘valid’ coined by Simpsons writer David X. Cohen. Following its appearance in an episode called ‘Lisa the Iconoclast’ (which also featured ‘embiggened’), it entered mainstream speech and is included in the Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English. It can be done! But it does help to be a writer on America’s longest-running sitcom.
Crossword: While working at the New York World, a Liverpudlian called Arthur Wynne invented the ‘crossword’ that my granny, mum and I still enjoy. Initially called a ‘word-cross’, the puzzle was such a hit that some American rail companies installed dictionaries in their compartments, like bibles in hotel rooms. Sudokus are displaying worrying popularity today, but crosswords are still, according to Bill Bryson, ‘the most popular sedentary amusement in America’, after watching TV. My mum, granny and I are not unusual in our love of words.
Cut the Mustard: A phrase invented by William Sydney Porter or O. Henry, the name he wrote his short stories under at the beginning of the twentieth century. A fascinating American, he also coined the term ‘banana republic’ in reference to Honduras where he was writing his book Cabbages and Kings whilst on the run from the Feds. The basis of ‘cut the mustard’ is less clear. In the late 1800s, the word ‘mustard’ was used to mean something of superior quality, which might explain it. Or it may stem from the verb ‘to muster’, with ‘cutting the mustered’ being a corruption of ‘passing muster’. I was once confused when I heard a newsreader announce that after a fire in a boarding school, pupils ‘left their beds and mustard outside’. I couldn’t understand why they would save either. I like to think Porter himself would have liked that. He certainly liked wordplay. The ‘O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships’, started and hosted by the O. Henry Museum in 1977, are still held annually every May in Austin. That’s not a bad legacy.
Decadent: Coined along with the modern sense of ‘environment’ by Scottish satirist Thomas Carlyle in the 1820s.
Demi: A coin coined by polymath Mr Palatino in 2007. ‘Coin coin’, incidentally, is the noise that French ducks make. Romanian dogs go ‘ham ham’ and English geese say ‘honk’.
Dude: Oscar Wilde is credited with the g
rowth of ‘dude’ in the UK, possibly as a portmanteau of ‘duds’ and ‘attitude’.
Egghead: As I hoped might be the case with my ‘games’, attempts to ridicule competitors have often had the side-effect of creating new words and raising the profile of one’s enemies. In 1952 a Connecticut Republican called Stewart Alsop invented the word ‘egghead’ to describe and ridicule his contemplative and bald opponent, Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson, incidentally, had already invented the word ‘brinkmanship’ (influenced by Stephen Potter’s recent ‘gamesmanship’), and he demonstrated this quality by embracing the nickname instead of taking offence, rallying his own supporters with the outstanding cry, ‘Eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your yolks,’ in one particular speech. The nickname stuck, Stevenson won many friends and while he never made the White House, losing both the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections to Dwight D. Eisenhower (who himself coined the not-nearly-as-catchy phrase ‘military-industrial complex’), ‘egghead’ did make the dictionary.
Embiggened: A cracking word launched, like ‘cromulent’, in the 1996 Simpsons episode ‘Lisa the Iconoclast’. Before then it was an obsolete term, found by series writer Dan Greaney festering in an 1884 publication called Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc by C. A. Ward.
Emoticon: The original smiley emoticon; ‘:-)’ was first officially used in print by Scott E. Fahlman, a professor at the delightful-sounding Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While discussing the limits of online humour on 19 September 1982, he wrote: ‘I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(.’ As irritating as the smiley’s subsequent success might be, that’s an inspiring tale of typographical invention. Isn’t it? :-@
Etiquette: Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, briefly sponsored Samuel Johnson’s dictionary before falling out with the lexicologist so spectacularly that Johnson accused him of teaching ‘the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master’. I don’t know much about how dancing masters behave in polite society, but I do know that the earl went on to export the fine word ‘picnic’ from French (it has nothing to do with racist lynching, despite urban myths to the contrary). In fact, Lord Chesterfield mastered this trick of nicking a word from another language and passing it off as one’s own brand new English word, borrowing ‘sang-froid’, ‘debut’, ‘gauche’, ‘ennui’ and ‘etiquette’ too.
Eureka: Famously invented in the bath by Archimedes of Syracuse in the third century BC.
Explain: As well as ‘explain’, Thomas More was the first to use ‘absurdity’, ‘exact’ and ‘exaggerate’. More famously, he invented the word ‘utopia’. He did not, however, make up the word ‘more’.
Galvanise: Scientists and engineers have always been in a prime position to invent words, as demonstrated by those of the late eighteenth century: In 1771 Italian physicist Luigi Galvani electrocuted a load of frogs and somehow justified it with the word ‘galvanisation’; in 1774 a German physician and astrologist called Franz Anton Mesmer made a patient swallow iron, attached magnets to her body and, although understandably discredited at the time, is for ever remembered in the verb ‘mesmerise’; while James Watt took the more orthodox approach of improving the steam engine to such an extent that the unit of power was named in his honour.
Games: Like one of the stranger Greek myths, the original ‘Games’ was (and still is) a fine writer and patient man called Alex Games who, through no fault of his own, was turned into an adjective after becoming the object of extreme jealousy for a comedian and rash man called Alex Horne.
Garage: An adjective, reminiscent of ‘village’, meaning ‘cheap and tawdry’, invented by Alex Horne’s wife after her husband took to buying ‘garage flowers’, ‘garage bacon’ and ‘garage bread’.
Goody-Two-Shoes: We don’t, unfortunately, know who came up with the phrase ‘goody-two-shoes’, which has always struck me as a peculiar description: I’ve always thought two shoes was the minimum requirement, rather than anything overly virtuous. We do know, however, that it comes from a story, the author of which remains anonymous, about an orphan called Margery Meanwell who went through life with just the one shoe until a rich gentleman gave her a complete pair. Understandably, she was chuffed so went round telling everyone she had ‘two shoes’ and thus earned her nickname (she also had her virtuousness rewarded by becoming a teacher and marrying a rich widower).
Gordon Bennett: James Gordon Bennett II (1841–1918) was the son of another Gordon, the extraordinarily wealthy founder of the New York Herald, who squandered much of his father’s honk funding balloon and yacht races, expeditions to Africa and the Arctic, and generally raising eyebrows and temperatures with his drunken hi-jinks until his name was rarely uttered without a subsequent exclamation mark (although, as so often, there is another explanation, this time involving a more modest biscuit-maker, also called Gordon Bennett, who used to advertise his product in Pontefract by shouting out his own name while cycling round town).
Groggy: English naval officer Lieutenant Edward Vernon donated his own nickname, Old Grog, to the daily ration of rum and water handed out during the intriguing but almost certainly bloody ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ contested between England and Spain from 1739 to 1742.
Grotty: This yucky adjective first appeared in Alun Owen’s screenplay for The Beatles’ debut feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, in 1964. Ringo Starr, by the way, was said by a 1963 fanzine to have invented the word ‘wack’ (meaning ‘pal’).
Grundies: This evocative word can be pinned on the Australian media executive Reg Grundy, who did little more than have a famous name that rhymes with ‘undies’. It always helps to be in the media where new language is concerned. By the way, the phrase ‘drop the dead donkey’ (which I never heard while working at the West Sussex Gazette) was invented by the producers of the TV show of that name. It was only when the programme became successful during the 1990s that the sentence became the clichéd call of cheesy newsrooms and desperate editors.
Guinea Pig: This animal was first used to mean ‘test subject’ by George Bernard Shaw in 1913, ten years after he coined the word ‘superman’ as the translation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch in Thus Spake Zarathustra. ‘Guinea pig’ and ‘superman’: that’s good gardening.
Happy as Larry: It was a boxer called Larry Foley (1847–1914) who was so contented that people still say they’re as happy as him.
Have a Good Time: Samuel Pepys’s diary of 1660 is the unlikely source of this phrase, as well as the words ‘gherkin’ and ‘gimp’.
Hector: The verb ‘to hector’ comes all the way from Homer’s Iliad, and a bullying Trojan prince whom Ajax (who has since become a cleaning product) fought twice in the poem. Imagine having your surname memorialised as a verb. That would be some achievement: ‘How was school, dear?’ ‘Not too bad, until Mr Arnold started horning me about bad grammar again.’ Actually, that doesn’t sound quite right.
Hello: I remember being taken quite aback when I was told (by no less a source than Stephen Fry on QI) that ‘hello’ is less than a hundred and fifty years old. That’s no age for a word; my grandmother’s grandmother wouldn’t have recognised it as a greeting. It was coined, according to the BBC programme, by Thomas Edison after he and Alexander Graham Bell mastered the telephone in 1876. Bell had come up with ‘ahoy’ to commence the novel situation of speaking to someone without being able to see them, but was trumped by Edison’s contrivance of ‘hello’; a less nautical salutation that proved ultimately popular. He first wrote it, according to a scholar called Allen Koenigsberg, in a letter to the president of Pittsburgh’s Central District and Printing Telegraph Company, Mr T. B. A. David, dated 15 August 1877.
But this isn’t quite the whole truth. A little further digging reveals that both ‘hallo’ and ‘hullo’ had been around far longer a
s expressions of surprise. ‘Hallo! What have we here?’ one might have exclaimed when startled by something startling in the early 1800s – a stray goat, maybe, or an extremely tall female newsreader. Over in America, folks were greeting each other with a cheery ‘hallow’ for at least one hundred years before the invention of the phone, and ‘hola’, surely a close relative, has been around even longer than that. In fact, ‘hello’ itself was used by Mark Twain in his 1872 book Roughing It in the sentence, ‘A miner came out and said: ‘Hello!”’ Moreover, if you want to believe the polyglot Mario Pei (as Bill Bryson does in his authoritative Mother Tongue), the word’s been around for at least six hundred years in the Old English form of hal beo thu or ‘whole be thou’, a medieval rendering of our ‘all right, mate’. Still, if Stephen Fry said it, it must be true; Thomas Edison invented the word ‘hello’.
Hollywood: At some point in the 1880s the elaborately named Mrs Daeida Hartell Wilcox Beveridge was chatting to a stranger and found out that he’d called his summer home ‘Hollywood’. So taken with this simpler name, she decided to rename her own ranch in its honour and the ‘Hollywood Hills’ were formed. Mrs Daeida Hartell Wilcox Beveridge can also take credit for the offshoot, ‘Bollywood’, which was let into the OED a hundred years later (partly because there now seems to be an ongoing argument, online at least, as to who first mixed Bombay with Hollywood).
Honest: The usual meanings of ‘truthful’, ‘genuine’, and ‘not deceptive’ (from the Latin adjective honestus, ‘honorable, respected’) have been around since the fourteenth century, but the lesser-known sense of ‘overweight’ was first suggested by the appropriately named Mr Elephant in 2007.