Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers Read Free

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
    BIBLIOBIBULI. Term coined by H. L. Mencken to describe those who are “drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion.”
    BIG BROTHER. British author George Orwell ’s (1903–1950) term for an omnipresent government that relied on covert operations to monitor and