Read Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers for Free Online Page A

talk as one’s ears can listen to at one time; a large quantity; a strong reprimand. The first appearance is in a 1917 story by American sports columnist and short story writer Ring Lardner (1885–1933). 1
    EBONICS. African American English when seen as a dialect with features derived from West African languages rather than a nonstandard variety of English. The name and the theory made its public debut on January 26, 1973, by Robert L. Williams , an African American and professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. Its first published appearance was in a 1975 book edited by Williams, Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks . Williams fashioned the term Ebonics by combining ebony (for black) and phonics (for the scientific study of speech sounds), and he used Ebonics to identify the variety of English spoken by many black Americans as a language or at least a dialect of its own rather than merely “bad English.” Aside from some Afrocentrists, however, everyone else continued to call it black English or, in a more scholarly vein, African American vernacular English.
    ECDYSIAST. Word coined by American author and journalist H. L. Mencken for a striptease. The term was based on a request from a very popular practitioner. As Mencken recounted in the second volume of The American Language , in 1940 he received a letter from Georgia Sothern asking him to create a word that would mean striptease but would contain a more elegant sound and sense: “I am a practitioner of the fine art of strip-teasing . . . In recent years, there has been a great deal of uninformed criticism leveled against my profession . . . I feel sure that if you could coin a new and more palatable word to describe this art, the objections to it would vanish and I and my colleagues would have easier going. I hope that the science of semantics can find time to help the verbally underprivileged members of my profession. Thank you.”

     
     
    Mencken chronicled the difficulty he encountered in searching for a synonym for stripteaser. “The word moltician comes to mind, but it must be rejected because of its likeness to mortician . . . A resort to the scientific name for molting, which is ecdysis, produces both ecdysist and ecdysiast. Then there are suggestions in the names of some of the creatures which practice molting. The scientific name for the common crab is Callinectes hastastus , which produces callinectian . Again, there is a family of lizards called the Geckonidae , and their name produces gecko . Perhaps your advisers may be able to find other suggestions in the same general direction.”
    Mencken settled on ecdysiast . 2
    ECONOLOGY. The blend of the words economy and ecology. The link between the two is based on the growing awareness of the impact of human activities on the environment. The word was minted as a typographical error by the teletype operator transmitting a column by Frank Worbs in the Beaver County Times, published in Pennsylvania. The column discussed the relationship between economy and ecology. A typo is a typo and nothing was made of the error for a month. But on February 17, 1972, Worbs wrote a follow-up column entitled “New Word Coined” in which he declared econology to be a legitimate new word with real-world application to environmental problems. 3
    EEYORE. A pessimistic person and by extension eeyorish for gloomy, or pessimistic. Several words and character names coined by A. A. Milne (1882–1956) in the Winnie-the-Pooh series have come into general use. The most prominent example may be the donkey, Eeyore, whose gloominess is notorious in the stories. A typical exchange between Eeyore and Pooh occurs when Pooh says “good morning” to Eeyore, and Eeyore responds, “Good morning, Pooh Bear . . . If it is a good morning . . . Which I doubt.” Eeyorish was added to the OED in 2003 along with muppet (taken from the children’s TV show Sesame Street , to mean a foolish person).

     
    EGGCORN. Name