Read Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers for Free Online

Name for the king of the vampires, invented by Bram Stoker (1847–1912) in the 1897 novel of this name, used allusively to denote a grotesque or terrifying person.
    DRAGON LADY. Any powerful villainous woman, from the character of the same name created in 1936 by Milt Caniff (1907–1988) for his Terry and the Pirates comic strip. She makes her first appearance in the strip of September 6 with the introductory line: “Mongolian Princess, My Eye! That woman is the Dragon Lady !”
    DRECK. Rubbish, worthless debris, a Yiddishism that the OED lists as having been introduced by James Joyce (1882-1941) in Ulysses, “Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck !” 6 This was probably in wide use long before Joyce but there is no earlier example in the context of written English.
    DROODLE. A riddle in the form of a simple line drawing—a blend of drawing and riddle. The term was invented and copyrighted by writer-cartoonist Roger Price (1918–1990), who published a book entitled Droodles in 1953. Droodle is a true lexical rarity in that it is not listed in the OED and neither is his other creation, the mad lib, which he created in 1953 with Leonard Stern.
    DYMAXION. The term is used in referring to construction and design by R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983): as “yielding the greatest possible efficiency in terms of the available technology, ‘doing the most with the least.’” The word was created by blending the word dynamic and the concept of maximum service . The word was not coined by Fuller. He explained in a 1969 private communication to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary that the word was coined for him in 1929 by his business associates as a “word-portrait” of him and his work. They were concerned to form a euphonious word of four syllables based on words that occurred in Fuller’s own description of his prototype (Dymaxion) house, viz, dy (namism), max (imum), and ion . When Fuller wrote his treatise on dymaxion , Nine Chains to the Moon , Carl Wiegman reviewed the book for the Chicago Tribune and noted, “It would be a lot more dymaxion if Mr. Fuller did not have a literary style that almost drives a reader crazy.” 7 *
    DYSTOPIA. See entry for UTOPIA .
     
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    * The drink consumed by Fitzgerald and his fictional characters was probably as follows:
     
    2 ounces light rum
    1 ounce fresh lime juice
    ¼ –½ ounce simple syrup
     
    Add all ingredients except the garnish with ice in a shaker. Shake well to combine. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish.
     
    * The earliest form of this word was domunym. After publishing several articles on the subject, including one that appeared in the March 1988 Smithsonian magazine, I received several letters noting that I could use some help with my neologism. The most compelling case was made by George H. Scheetz, then director of the Sioux City (Iowa) Public Library and member of the American Name Society and the North Central Name Society, who has actually made a study of words with a -nym ending. Scheetz wrote:
     
All but two historically occurring words ending in -nym actually end in -onym, and all but approximately six percent are formed from Greek root words. In other words, the Latin root dom- (from domus ), more correctly forms domonym . However, the Greek root is already in use as a combining form, domato- (from domatos ), which forms domatonym . Literally, both these combinations mean “a house name.” The names Tara and The White House are domatonyms. So Scheetz must be credited with a major assist with this word.
     
    * Fuller attained a level of eponymous glory in the name buckminsterfullerene, which is officially described as “an extremely stable form of carbon whose molecule consists of 60 carbon atoms joined together as a truncated regular icosahedron of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, forming a symmetrical spheroidal structure suggestive of the geodesic dome.” The geodesic dome is one of Fuller’s inventions.

E
     
    EARFUL. As much