Hi, I’m John Green, welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube and I am a
nerd and did you know that Dr. Seuss gets credit for inventing the word “nerd”?
In his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, Seuss wrote, “And then, just to show them, I'll sail
to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and
a Seersucker too!"
And that’s the first of many words invented by authors that I’m going to share with
you today. One note though: these are the first times these words were found in print
so it IS possible that they were already being used orally. But we can at least credit these
authors with being the first known use of the terms.
Charles Dickens coined the term “flummox” in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which
was published in 1837. Later in his career, Dickens invented the word “boredom” in
his 1853 novel, Bleak House.
That's funny, because that's what Bleak House made me feel when I read it in high school.
But it turns out it's actually quite good, I was just kind of an idiot.
The Oxford English Dictionary credits Geoffrey Chaucer with the first known use of the word
“Twitter.” Of course, back then it meant “to chirp continuously”, whereas now,
it still kind of means to chirp continuously. Regardless, that word is hashtag old.
JJ Astor didn’t INVENT the word “spaceship” in his 1894 sci-fi novel A Journey in Other
Worlds, but he did change its meaning to the one we know today: a spacecraft.
Speaking of authors that have repeating consonants in their name, JRR Tolkien came up with the
word “tween.” In the Fellowship of the Ring, he wrote, “At that time Frodo was
still in his tweens, as the hobbits called the irresponsible twenties between childhood
and coming of age at thirty-three."
I guess that makes Daenerys a tween. And everyone who works on Mental Floss except for me.
Oh my God, I'm so old.
The word “serendipity” was first used by Horace Walpole in 1754. He was writing
a letter and coined the term, which was inspired by a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes
of Serendip.
In Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll invented the word “chortle.”
The word “blatant” is first found in Edmund Spenser’s 1596 poem “The Faerie Queen.”
In the poem, the “blatant beast” is a monster with iron teeth and a thousand tongues.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who lived from 1772-1834 invented many words, like “bisexual,”
“psychosomatic,” and “narcissism.”
Oh, we have a narcissist: beaded Walter White.
Speaking of dead English poets, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the capital of Hell is called
Pandæmonium, which gave us our word for… you guessed it: ”pandemonium.”
In the 1958 poem “The Ghost’s Leavetaking,” Sylvia Plath invented the word “dreamscape.”
“Yahoo” is a race of brutish people in Jonathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels.
Then the world adopted it to mean essentially the same thing.
Or that company that you used for your email, until Gmail.
The word “beep” is first found in print in a 1951 Arthur C. Clarke novel, The Sands
of Mars.
Speaking of science fiction, we can thank the genre for the term “cyberspace.” Like
throughout the eighties, the word was used in novels, and in 1982, the William Gibson’s
short story “Burning Chrome” used the term to mean how we know it today -- communication
between a network of computers.
“Tintinnabulation” was Edgar Allen Poe’s word for the sound of ringing bells in his
1848 poem “The Bells.” Though you probably don’t HEAR this one regularly, it IS in
the dictionary.
Utopia was Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book about the society of a fictional island. This is
why we now describe ideal societies as “utopias.”
And if you love words that start with vowels, you’ll love this one. There’s a software
called Ansible, which got its name from the 1966 novel Rocannon’s World by Ursula K.
Le Guin.
I know there's lots of Orson Scott Card fans out there wwho are like "No no no, that term
was in Ender's Game!" -- yes, but that came after.
Now this one is technically two words, but it’s interesting, so I’m just going to
squeeze it in here. The term “atomic bomb” was first seen in a 1914 novel by HG Wells
called The World Set Free. Then, the Hungarian-American physicist Leó Szilárd read that book and
patented the idea of a nuclear reactor.
The word “gargantuan” is borrowed from a 16th century French story called The Life
of Gargantua and of Pantagruel by François Rabelais.
Here at Mental Floss, we like to make gargantuan things tiny. Like Genghis Khan and this huge
dinosaur and... what? Oh my God, what are you?
Now for an obvious one: Vladimir Nabokov coined the term “nymphet” in his 1955 novel,
Lolita.
“Freelance” meant a mercenary in medieval times. It was coined by Sir Walter Scott in
his 1820 novel, Ivanhoe. These days, of course, freelance means a job! Without benefits. But
with more taxes!
Merriam-Webster defines “runcible spoon” as “a sharp-edged fork with three broad
curved prongs.” The term “runcible” comes from author Edward Lear, who used it
in multiple works to mean multiple things. But the word probably gained popularity thanks
to his 1871 poem The Owl and the Pussycat, which refers to a “runcible spoon.”
Sci-fi writer Karel Čapek coined the term “robot” in his 1920 play, R.U.R. The play
was in Czech, but the spelled-out acronym in the title can be translated to Rossum’s
Universal Robots.
In Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals, there was a character named Mrs.
Malaprop, who often used the wrong words. From that character, we get our word, “malapropism.”
This passage can be found in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster
Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it's all beside the
mark.” So, we can thank Joyce for the word “quark.”
Washington Irving gets credit for the word “knickerbocker” because it was actually
his pseudonym for a while. He went by the name “Diedrich Knickerbocker” in the early
1800s before the word came to mean pants.
Stephen King may or may not have coined the term “pie-hole” in his 1983 novel Christine.
That book, by the way, is like Herbie Fully Loaded, but it's actually even scarier. Anyway,
that's the first time “pie-hole” can be found in print, but it may have been slang
that he picked up.
Mark Twain is responsible for a few words in print for the first time, like “hard-boiled”
and “bicentennial.”
In 1907, author Gelett Burgess invented both the blurb and the word “blurb.”
Louisa May Alcott gets credit for the abbreviation “co-ed,” which can be found in her 1886
novel, Jo’s Boys.
I’m going to finish up with some words that Shakespeare invented because... he invented
a lot of them, including “alligator,” and “cold-blooded,” and “eventful,”
and “bump”, as a noun at least.
Then we have “bedazzled” from Taming of the Shrew, “obscene” in Love’s Labor’s
Lost, “luggage” in King Henry IV, and “assassination” in Macbeth.
And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that the first known use of the word “swagger”
is from none other than Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Something for you
rap stars to consider.
Thanks for watching Mental Floss here on YouTube, which is made with the help of all these nice
people. Don't forget to watch our other shows. Thank you again for watching this one and
as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be mawkwawk! See? I can make up my own words.
I never said I was good at it, but I can do it!