The biological component is incidental, there. I’m as up on Golden Age SF as the next guy, and “android” has meant simply “manlike” (by-and-large) for a goodly long time. Since the early '60s, the word “cyborg” has had the approximate meaning you ascribe to “android.”
As far as Philip K. Dick’s use of the word (in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or elsewhere) is concerned, he certainly didn’t have such a definition in mind. In his 1972 essay “The Android and the Human,” he wrote:
Many fiction writers use “android” to refer to a robot with a sentient level of intelligence. Commander Data on Star Trek, for example, was always referred to as an android. Such robots are usually more-or-less human in appearance, but it’s the human-like mind that makes them androids.
And the OED gives first cite to Lucas:
This sounds like a case where someone used the word once, but was forgotten until someone happened to come across it long after Lucas’s version became standard (I’d argue Dr. Seuss’s “coinage” of “nerd” is the same thing). Further, it’s a French book, which means it is a French word, and clearly not an English one (if it had been used in English, then the OED would have cited it.) Your cite is one reason why the Wikipedia should not be considered definitive.
CalMeachum – Oh, definitely. The original robots are what we would now call androids, and Lucas’s “droids” were what SF readers would have called “robots” at the time.
Chronos – No – a robot was a mechanical device; most were humanoid (e.g., R. Daneel Olivaw), some were not (Anthony Boucher’s “Q.U.R.”). “Androids” (e.g., Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass) were human shaped, but organic. Android stories in SF often dealt with issues of race and their need to be accepted as fully human.
I definitely have to disagree with you on this point. “Cyborg” is a portmanteau for “cybernetic organism”, and implies both biological and mechanical parts, usually mechanical parts added to an existing biological entity (like the Six Million Dollar Man, who started off in the Martin Caidin book “Cyborg”)
It’s clearly not synonymous with the use of “android” I describe, and I don’t know of anyone who uses it that way.
And I stand by my description of “android” as biological creatures. I don’t know of any Golden-age to 1970s writer who used that term for “human-shaped robot”.
If that counts, so does every planet except Earth, and a big bunch of other celestial bodies too.
Gad, if only I’d seen this last week when I was tidying up my comic collection. I actually held in my hand a 1970s copy of Richie Rich which shows him and girlfriend Gloria flying while holding the handle of an over-sized umbrella. The story (which involves them being caught in an updraft and blown to the top of the previously unexplored Mt. Mystery) is about them discovering and trying to escape from a city of androids.
Gloria: What are androids, Richie?
Richie: They’re robots that look like people.
Anyway, the issue is at my girlfriend’s house and the above synopsis is (geekily) from memory. She sends my old comix to her nephew in Norway a few at a time, and the leftovers culled from my collection have given her enough material to ship until the kid is in med school. I’ll see if I can retrieve it.
George Costanza once told a woman that he coined the phrase “Pardon my French.”
Well…according to Wikipedia,
So it indeed appears to be made up in a comedy, but not The Simpsons.
Sailboat
There’s a third Asimov coinage (I’m ignoring ‘pocket calculator’, as that’s two words). Late in his life, he was proud to appear in the OED in three entries: the previously mentioned ‘robotics’ and ‘positronic’, as well as ‘psychohistory’.
Besides being far and away less well-known than the other two, ‘psychohistory’ was also marred by not being original to The Good Doctor. I don’t recall the detail, but it had been presented earlier without his ever hearing it himself. So the OED lists his Foundation novels as a second source of the word, with its peculiar definition.
Does anyone have a copy of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame handy? I can’t recall the name of the story, or the author, but it is voiced in the first person, from the point of view of an android. In this story, androids have circuitry that prevents them from harming humans, yet the story begins with a search party finding the dead body of a little girl, with the evidence pointing to her murder by an android.
“What kind of blood don’t coagulate?”
“Droid blood doesn’t coagulate.”
Turns out that excessive ambient temperatures (and there’s a heat wave going on) causes at least this one 'droid to go crazy. “The heat is all reet.”
kaylasdad99 – I’m not certain, because I don’t recall that incident, but a robot or android (I don’t recall which) that goes crazy is central to Alfred Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit, which is certainly in The SF Hall of Fame.
Fondly Fahrenheit it was. Thanks.
Anyway, that was my introduction to the word “droid.” In 1977, I thought Lucas stole it from Bester on purpose.
I think of it more as said by black folks to indicate someone who considers being in good with the white folks more important than being true to his race, or a sell-out. Or someone who has gotten in good with the white folks so they are “trusted” by the oppressor, aka a house negro.
I don’t have a copy handy to check, but wasn’t the robot in the story “Satisfaction Guaranteed” described as an android? He was designed to be human not just in shape, but in appearance (as in, could be mistaken for human), and was suited to various household tasks.
In any event, I think we can agree that there is no definition by which R2D2 qualifies as an android, so “droid” as applied to R2D2 and his like can be considered a new coinage.
Malaprop - n : the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one that sounds similar [syn: malapropism] - taken from the name of a character in Oscar Wilde’s play “the Importance of Being Ernest”, the dim-witted Mrs. Malaprop.
Brainiac and Bizarro were initially names of Superman villains.
And then there’s Shazam! (which is commonly pronounced “Shu-ZAM!!!”) which came first from the comic book, then from the Andy Griffith Show.
the word “cromulent” comes from Blackadder? cite, please.
There’s contrafribblarities, anus-peptic, phrasmotic, compunctious and pericombobulation, but I’m not aware of cromulent.
Older than that. See post #131.
In fact, there is no such character in TIOBE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest
It was Sheridan’s “The Rivals”, not Wilde. “The Importance of Being Earnest” premiered more than a century after Sheridan’s play.
Three pages with no mention of Ira Levin? Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby?