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(1923)
    market research (1920)
    off-the-rack (1920)
    food chain (1920)
    nutritionist (1921)
    check-up (1921)
    comparison-shopping (1923)
    devalue (1918)
    white-collar (1919)
    posh (1919)
    upgrade (1920)
    ritzy (1920)
    swankiness (1920)
    nouveau poor (1921)
    sophisticate (1923)
    cross-selling (1919)
    inflationary (1920)
    deflationary (1920)
    merchant bank (1921)
    arbitrage (1923)
    subprime (1920)
    The year 1922 alone added “brand-name,” “Hollywood,” “moviegoing,” “rough cut,” “performative,” “robot,” “sparkly,” “schlep,” “dimwit,” “no-brow,” “oops,” “multilayered,” “rebrand,” “mass market,” “broadcasting” and “broadcaster,” “finalize,” “lamé,” “sexiness,” “transvestite,” “gigolo,” “to proposition,” “libidinal,” “post-Freudian,” “cold turkey,” “quantum mechanics,” “polyester,” “vacuum,” “notepad,” “duplex,” “Rolex,” “entrepreneurial,” and “party-crashing” to English. In December 1922, E. E. Cummings would give us the first use of “partied” as a verb, in a letter describing a night spent with the New York literary crowd. And in
This Side of Paradise
Scott Fitzgerald was the first to record the words “T-shirt,” “Daiquiri,” “hipped” (“I’m hipped on Freud and all that”) and the use of “wicked” as a term of approval. Amory Blaine, the novel’s protagonist, is advised to collect the new, and told: “remember, do the next thing!”

    T he Fitzgeralds always remembered to do the next thing. An article in March that year, responding to
The Beautiful and Damned
,
remarked that Scott Fitzgerald’s “up-to-dateness is one of his chief assets. He believes in the vivid present, the immediate moment.” The Fitz, as they were sometimes known in the early years, danced on tables and rode on the top of taxicabs; both later noted, ruefully, that it costs a good deal more to ride outside cabs than in them. In the early hours of the morning Fitzgerald jumped, fully clothed, into the fountain in front of the Plaza, which was appropriately named “Abundance.” He insisted he wasn’t boiled: the stunt was inspired by sheer exuberance. Never to be outdone, Zelda danced in the fountain at Union Square. They knew that “a chorus of pleasant envy followed in the wake of their effortless glamor,” Scott wrote. “They thought of themselves as a team, and it was often remarked how well mated they were.”
    Zelda boiled the jewelry of partygoers in tomato soup; she rode out of hotel rooms in laundry wagons and was seen involved in “goings-on” at parties with men who weren’t her husband because, she announced, she admired their haircut or was charmed by their nose. Wilson recorded in his diaries that at one party Zelda so inflamed a mutual friend that he likened himself to a satyr, claiming, “I can feel my ears growing pointed!” “He became so aroused,” Wilson noted gleefully, “that he was obliged to withdrawto the bathroom. He was found in a state of collapse and murmured: ‘She made provoking gestures to me!’” Wilson also noted Zelda’s propensity for kissing Scott’s friends after they were married: “When Zelda first began kissing John [Bishop] and Townsend [Martin], Fitz tried to carry it off by saying: ‘Oh, yes, they really have kisses coming to them, because they weren’t at the wedding, and everybody at a wedding always gets a kiss.’ But when Zelda rushed into John’s room just as he was going to bed and insisted that she was going to spend the night there, and when she cornered Townsend in the bathroom and demanded that he should