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.”