Huxley didn’t coin the word. It was in use in very ancient times and is mentioned in the Hindu holy texts as a ritual drink and the god associated with it.
You’re not serious, are you? Even if you ignore “automobile,” (a good nineteenth century word,) “Oldsmobile” was around at the turn-of-the-century.
A word that embiggens us all.
OK, you’re right.
Frankenstein, now (mis)used to mean a monster or nemesis
“Snarky,” a term quite popular on internet message boards, traces back to Lewis Carroll.
I am reliably told that the term “I can’t see jack-shit” originated in an underground comic, “Road Vultures” by Spain Rodriguez.
I’ve always been skeptical about this; the story, as I’ve heard it, is that he “was reading Finnegans Wake” when he found found the word. But no one actually sits down and “reads” Finnegans Wake; it’s undertaken only by those who have either a professional interest or a year of free time. The word “quarks” appears exactly once in the book (page 383, for those of you reading along at home), and it seems unlikely that he would have found it by opening to a page at random–which is IMO the best way to read FW–or been sufficiently charmed* by it to name his most famous discovery after it.
And now that it occurs to me to go Googling, I find this:
Granted, it’s on a Geocities page, but if you follow the author-link, you’ll find his homepage; he’s written a few books and is apparently some kind of lecturer in physics.
Still, the only other cite I could find was some dude on a message board who calls himself “chris.” Chris says, “Gell-Mann claims that he arrived at the name ‘quark’ independently - citing as evidence the fact that he pronounced it to rhyme with ‘walk’, not with ‘lark’ as Joyce indicated for his usage.”
I can’t imagine how “quark” could rhyme with “walk,” but as long as Chris is on my side, I’ll remain firmly convinced that he is a paragon of veracity and virtue.
Was he British? They don’t know how to say anything right…
The same way that “Paula” rhymes with “trawler”
“Catch-22” from from the novel of the same name by Joseph Heller.
Douglas Coupland is credited with “Generation X” from his book.
Shakespeare is a repository of words and phrases that were unrecorded earlier. Scholars have furious rows over whether he invented them or merely was the first to use them in a work that made it through history. But they number in the dozens or hundreds, depending on how big your vocabulary is. Of course, an equal if not greater number of his coinages were never used again.
Shakespeare coined a lot of words and phrases that are now commonly used. Here’s a National Geographic article from 2004 on the subject, and here is a list of coinages from RhymeZone (which includes “assassination”).
(On preview, Exapno Mapcase has beaten me to this point, but I’ll post my links anyway. :p)
I’m surprised that the OP named two Heinlein coinages, but not Asimov’s two. Asimov coined the words “robotics” and “positronic”, without even realizing that he was doing so. He figured they were logical inflected forms of “robot” and “positron” respectively, but he was the first to use either.
Ursula K. LeGuin invented the word **ansible ** to describe a device used to communicate instantaneously over vast interstellar distances. It’s been picked up more generally in the scifi world.
I’d say 1984 also contributed **Big Brother ** and doublespeak.
It hasn’t happened, but I’d love to see general usage of James Hynes’s term for the privileged, suburb-dwelling, soccer-mom, SUV-driving class: the truckoisie
No, Carroll did not invent the word “portmeanteau,” but he was the first to apply it to a kind of word. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=portmanteau&searchmode=none
Hm! And I’ve always heard “quark” pronounced to rhyme with “pork”!
While the term “acid test” was in the language prior to Tom Wolfe, his book “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test” gave a whole nother meaning to it. Similarly Jack Kerousc and “On The Road.”
Don’t trust that Rhymezone site.
Here’s a caveat from Languagehat’s blog :
*A correspondent has brought to my attention this silly site (Rhymezone), which purports to list “some of Shakespeare’s many coinages!” What they mean, of course, is “words first attested in Shakespeare,” but that doesn’t sound nearly as sexy. And some of them aren’t even that; “accused,” for instance, is centuries older:
1297 R. Glouc. 523 “Sir Hubert de Boru… Acused was to the king of mani luther prise [‘wrongful takings’].” *
As he says, a first attestation is not necessarily a coinage.
And OED1 takes the word assassin back to the 13th century.
:dubious: He better not be. “Generation X” is the name of a novel written in…1964? Or thereabouts. Meant to refer to the baby boomers. Sigh Even our name is a worn out handmedown.
Can’t find that book on Amazon. Cite?