Free Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers by Paul Dickson

James Bond has conceived a daughter, Mata Bond, with Hari. This would have been impossible since the daughter’s fictional birth was three years after the real female spy died.

     
    MAU-MAU. To terrorize by intimidation, a creation of Tom Wolfe in his 1970 work Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing Flak Catchers. “Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco.” The name came from the Mau Mau, an anti-European secret society in colonial Kenya.
    ME DECADE. Label for the 1970s in America that was coined by novelist Tom Wolfe in New York magazine in August 1976, describing the new preoccupation with self-awareness and the collective retreat from history, community, and human reciprocity. 2
    MEEKER. To visit places that have acquired some sort of shrine status. As demonstrated by its inventor, Ivor Brown , “Myriads . . . go meekering at Stratford-upon-Avon.”
    MELTING POT. Metaphor for a unified albeit diverse United States, first employed in this sense of the term by writer Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) in his 1908 play The Melting Pot, which developed the theme. The term was enthusiastically embraced by turn-of-the-century Americans who were eager to find a unifying national concept at a time when the United States was becoming more ethnically diverse than ever before. “The metaphor was hugely popular when it was introduced, and the play was a big success with the general public,” wrote Peter D. Salins in his book Assimilation, American Style. He added, “President Theodore Roosevelt was so enamored of the play’s message that he compared Zangwill favorably to George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. Popular faith in the melting pot survived both the Great Depression and World War II. But it did not survive the 1960s.” 3
    While Zangwill made the term popular it was created in a different context by essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who heralded this philosophy in 1845 when he wrote in his journal “so in this continent—asylum of all nations,—the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the melting pot of the Dark Ages.”
    MEME. The fundamental units of culture, like DNA. First coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins , “a meme represents ideas, behaviors or styles that spread from person to person. It can be a trendy dance, a viral video, a new fashion, a technological tool or a catchphrase. Like viruses, memes arise, spread, mutate and die.” One of the problems with the term that may hamper its ultimate use in conversational English is that there is considerable confusion as to how to pronounce the word.
    MENTAL MASTURBATION. A vivid metaphor constructed by Lord Byron (1788-1824) and applied to John Keats. In a letter to his publisher, John Murray, he said of the poet: “Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always frigging his imagination—I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium.” 4
    MICROCOMPUTER. A small computer employing microprocessors based on a single chip. In the July 1956 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) debuted the term in a story called “The Dying Night” in this line: “It had become the hallmark of the scientist, much as . . . the microcomputer that of the statistician.” The term is often paired with the word revolution to describe the period beginning in the early 1980s when inexpensive personal computers first became available to the public. Asimov was a prolific writer who was the first (and, thus far, only) author to have a book in every one