I was directed this week to a Reader’s Digest listicle from 2021 about common terms that were coined by presidents. I had no idea Franklin Delano Roosevelt coined the term “iffy” or that Abraham Lincoln made up the term “sugarcoat” in its metaphorical usage for making some idea or information superficially easy to take in. But a surprising number of words and phrases that we almost don’t think of as having needed to be coined were made up by people with household names. Sticking to the very politically powerful, there’s the possibly true story about “OK” coming from Martin Van Buren, nicknamed Old Kinderhook, though etymologists have about half a dozen other viable theories on that one. Then there’s that other ubiquitous expression, “OMG,” which comes not from teenagers on AOL, but as best anyone can tell, from a telegram sent to one “right honorable Winston Churchill.” Per Smithsonian magazine, when a somewhat-young Winston was an officer, Lord Fisher sent him a note mentioning that “a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis–O.M.G (Oh! My God!) Shower it on the admiralty!!” Let it not be said that teenage girls invented either cutesy, overwrought textspeak or status-consciousness.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is famous writers who have often made up the terms that make it into common usage. Everyone knows there are some hundreds of common phrases due to William Shakespeare. But he has hundreds of years on us mere moderns. More surprising is who made up such phrases as, for example, the “Cold War.” George Orwell was obviously a tremendously linguistically inventive man, who just in 1984 invented terms including “memoryhole,” “doublethink,” and “thought police.” But it was in his essay “You and the Atom Bomb” that a defining phrase of the 20th century first appeared. Orwell, discussing James Burnham, describes what was then a novel and horrifying concept. He raises the prospect of “the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.”
Another great socialist writer worth reading for his excellent style and insight is responsible for a phrase we use without thinking about its needing to have been coined. Per the New York Times Magazine, it was the author of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, who made up the distinction between “blue collar” and “white collar” workers in the ’20s, at a time when denim was cheap. His original usage was given to “describing ‘the most bitter despisers’ of the union workingman as ‘poor office-clerks, who are often the worst exploited of proletarians, but who, because they are allowed to wear a white collar, and to work in the office with the boss, regard themselves as members of the capitalist class.’’ Today, of course, politicians on both sides of the aisle campaign as blue-collar heroes, which says something for bipartisanship in America’s ideal picture of itself, if nothing else.
Then there’s Dr. Seuss, whose proper name is Theodor Geisel. For the past several years, since he became a culture war flashpoint when a few of his books were substantively banned by online sellers and libraries in a depressing moment of left-wing censoriousness, Seuss has been a political matter. It’s not a good sign of the times — nor, by the way, are right-wing attempts to ban books in the intervening time. (Read about it at greater length in my piece “The Freedom to Read is Good Indeed.”) This is what happens in a society run by nerds, who have no sense of heart and fun. But, to get back to the fun, here’s a fun fact: Dr. Seuss made up the word “nerd” in one of those banned books, If I Ran the Zoo. In the children’s book, the narrator who thinks on running a zoo would collect “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a seersucker too.” Words are fun, and you never know where enriching new slang will come from.
A final fact, which blew my mind: The term “slang” is a slang shortening of “short language.” Have fun with that.
