Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers by Paul Dickson Read Free Book Online Page A

unsuspecting public a single word of terrifying power and controversy . . . I suppose I should apologize to all users of language for my crime against nomenclature. I could also apologize to my wife, a writer and my editor, who lobbied loudly against the word when I invented it—and later came to believe that if we had only copyrighted it, we’d be fabulously wealthy by now.”
    Fried’s apologia was published online and immediately attracted comments such as this one from a person named Carson: “This is the longest and most fulsome humble brag I can remember coming upon. It has to go in the humble-brag hall of fame and in the U.S. Dept. of Weights and Measures as the standard by which all future humble-brags are henceforth measured.” 1
    FEMINIST. One who advocates social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. Created by Alexander Dumas in 1873 as feministe and translated as feminist by G. Vandenhoff and identified in his translation as a neologism “The feminists [Vr.feministes] (excuse this neologism) say, with perfectly good intentions, too: All the evil rises from the fact that we will not allow that woman is the equal of man.” 2
    FILM NOIR. First used (and presumably coined) by French critic Nino Frank (1904–1988) in 1946 to describe certain American B movies characterized by surreal settings, bold use of black and white, and visual contrast. The term has been clipped and extended to use as the adjective noir for anything akin to the films so described—a noir dream, mood, novel, etc.
    FIRE-WATER. Liquor; ardent spirits. A word introduced by James Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans through the observations of the character Natty Bumppo, the wilderness scout known as Pathfinder among the English and as Hawkeye among the Mohicans. “The Dutch landed, and gave my people the fire - water ; they drank until the heavens and the earth seemed to meet, and they foolishly thought they had found the Great Spirit.”
    FLIBBERTIGIBBET. As a verb meaning to gad about frivolously; to play the flibbertigibbet (from the Middle English flepergebet ) . In 1921 John Galsworthy (1867–1933) turned it into a verb, which netted him a separate entry in the OED because he wrote: “His daughter would flibberty-gibbit all over the place like most young women since the War.”

     
    FLOWER POWER. Slogan created by American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) while encouraging antiwar protesters to embrace nonviolent rebellion. Ginsberg was a poet and one of the people who inspired the sixties counterculture. He was one of the most articulate voices of the beat generation, and his poem “Howl” is considered one of the most influential poems of the post–World War II era. 3
    FNORD. Term first used in Robert Anton Wilson ’s (1932–2007) trilogy The Illuminati Papers to mean a propaganda work used to condition the masses from a very young age to respond with fear and anxiety. Over time the term has come to mean anything out of context that also has a surreal element. Fnords find comfort in offbeat web pages and places like the Urban Dictionary where definitions abound. A merciful few examples:
Fnord is a little pufflike cloud you see at 5 pm.
Fnord lives in the empty space above a decimal point.
Fnord is the 43 1/3rd state, next to Wyoming.
Fnord is the blue stripes in the road that never get painted.
Fnord is the empty pages at the end of the book.
Fnord uses two bathtubs at once.
    FOMA. Harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. They make you feel good and are the basis for US novelist Kurt Vonnegut ’s (1922–2007) fictional religion Bokononism. Examples of common fomas : (1) Prosperity is just around the corner. (2) Don’t worry. You’ll get back together.
    FOURTH ESTATE. Traditional name for the press and nowadays called the media. Although it is believed that the term was coined by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the earliest recorded use of the term Fourth Estate to refer to the