Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers Read Free Page B

Blatant Beast as it appears in the poem is “a dreadful fiend of gods and men, ydrad”; the type of calumny or slander. He was begotten of Cerberus and Chimera, and has a hundred tongues and a sting; with his tongues he speaks things “most shameful, most unrighteous, most untrue,” and with his sting “steeps them in poison.” Sir Artegal pursues him and Sir Calidore muzzles the monster, and draws him with a chain to Faerie Land. The beast breaks his chain and regains his liberty. Having coined the word blatant , Spenser never uses it except as a modifier for his monster. It is probably derived from the provincial word blate , meaning to bellow or roar. 13
    BLUE-COLLAR. See WHITE-COLLAR .
    BLURB. A brief descriptive paragraph or note of the contents or character of a book, printed as a commendatory advertisement on the wrapper, or jacket, of a newly published work. The word was coined in 1907 by American author and humorist Gelett Burgess (1866–1951), who employed a book jacket embellished with a drawing of a pulchritudinous young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Belinda Blurb. It was later given a full definition in his 1914 comic dictionary Burgess Unabridged :
     

     
     
Blurb , 1. A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher . . . On the “jacket” of the “latest” fiction, we find the blurb; abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the “sensation of the year.”
     
    The term gained such immediate acceptance that all friendly endorsements became known as blurbs. In the early 1950s there was a move to replace the term with the euphonious jacketism (alluding to the dust jacket of a book), but it was an ill-fated move. *
    B OBOS. American journalist David Brooks ’s compressing of “bourgeois bohemians” used to describe former social rebels who are now well-heeled and self-indulgent and featured in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There . Brooks explained the gist of the term and the book as his discovery of an “America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn’t just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people’s attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man.”
    BOOBOISIE. A segment of the general public composed of uneducated, uncultured persons. It is a blend of boob + bourgeoisie , coined by H. L. Mencken in 1922. An individual American who was not too bright was termed Boobus Americanus by Mencken, the reporter, editor, columnist, and author of many books including The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States.
    BOOM. As a verb meaning to burst into prosperity or suddenly rise in popularity, this term was introduced by Joseph B. McCullagh (?–1896), a St. Louis newspaper editor, in July 1878: “The fact is, the Grant movement for a third term of the presidency, is booming.” When he was later asked to explain the word, McCullagh replied, “I cannot recall how I came to use it except that, while on the gunboats of the Mississippi River during the war I heard pilots say of the river when rising rapidly and overflowing its banks, that it was ‘booming.’ The idea I wished to convey was that the Grant movement was rising—swelling. The word seemed to be a good one to the ear, and I kept it up. The word was generally adopted about a year afterward. I used it as a noun, after a while and spoke of  ‘the Grant boom.’  ” 14
    BOREDOM. One could be a bore before 1852, but this word for tedium did not enter the English language until 1852, when Charles Dickens used it six times in his ninth novel, Bleak House. The French word ennui was in full play when