Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers Read Free Page A

modify the behavior of its citizens: “Big Brother is watching you.” (One of George Orwell’s six rules of good writing was never to use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.)
    BILLIONAIRE. The possessor of property worth a billion or more dollars. Coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894) in his 1861 novel Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny : “One would like to give a party now and then, if one could be a billionaire.”
    BIOGRAPHY. Restoration poet and critic John Dryden (1631–1700) coined this word in the preface to his translation of Plutarch in which he defined it as “the history of particular men’s lives.”
    BIOPHILIA. Name of 1984 book by American biologist E. O. Wilson in which the term is created and defined as the “innate human urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”
    BIRTH CONTROL. Term created by Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), who founded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and was in the forefront of the fight for women’s reproductive rights. The term first appeared in her socialist-feminist periodical the Woman Rebel in 1914. In the same year Sanger wrote and published a pamphlet on methods of contraception, Family Limitation , which was based on her research on techniques and technologies available around the world. 11
    BITCH GODDESS. Success as seen through the prism of its negative consequences; any destructive obsession. Creation of pioneering American psychologist William James (1842–1910), who wrote in 1906: “A symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success.” D. H. Lawrence (1895–1930) used the term to fine effect in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “He realized now that the bitch - goddess of success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her, but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and bones.” 12  
    BLABBERMOUTH. First used by John Steinbeck in his 1936 novel In Dubious Battle : “One minute he’s a blabber-mouth kid.”
    BLACK HOLE. An invisible object in outer space formed when a massive star collapses from its own gravity. A black hole has such a strong pull of gravity—within a certain distance of it—nothing can escape, not even light. Coined by John A. Wheeler (1911–2008) at a conference in New York in 1967, Dr. Wheeler, seizing on a suggestion shouted from the audience, hit on the name black hole to dramatize this dire possibility for a star and for physics. The black hole ‘’teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but,’’ he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
    BLACK POWER. Created by African American writer Richard Wright (1908–1960) as the title for his 1954 book on Africa’s Gold Coast and its enormous potential. The term was adopted as a slogan for a broader movement in support of civil rights and political power for black people. The movement was especially prominent in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and closely associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Wright’s books tended to have strong, memorable titles— Uncle Tom’s Children , Black Boy, and Native Son.

     
    BLADDERCLOCK. The use of one’s bladder as an alarm clock; drinking the right amount of water the night before to get up at a specified time in the morning. Coinage of Bill Sherk , author of Brave New Words , a brilliant collection of fresh mintings from Canada.
    BLATANT. The word first appeared in 1596, as part of poet Edmund Spenser ’s (1552–1599) poem “The Faerie Queene.” The invented word describes a horrible monster known as the Blatant Beast, which is why the word’s first definition is “noisy and particularly vulgar.” The