Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers by Paul Dickson

government, it attained wide popular use. The term was coined by Arthur J. Norton , a member of the US Census Bureau, but given a great lift by radio commentator and broadcast poet Charles Osgood in his poem “My POSSLQ,” which opened with the stanza:
     
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands and crystal brooks
With silken lines, and silver hooks.
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
If you would be my POSSLQ. *
    POSTMODERNISM. The term postmodern was coined in the late 1940s by British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) in his monumental multivolume A Study of History. Toynbee was convinced that a new historical epoch had begun, in the post–World War I era with the emergence of “mass society,” where the normal working class played a more important role than the capitalist class. The term was redeployed in the mid-1970s by the American art critic and theorist Charles Jencks to describe contemporary antimodernist movements like pop art. *
    POWER ELITE. American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) created the term in a 1956 book of the same title to characterize a new coalition of three ruling groups that rose to dominance in the post–World War II United States that composed the power elite: the military, large corporations, and government leaders. He thought this concentration of power was progressively more centralized and undemocratic. The Power Elite was one of a series of books that came about within a few years of one another and leveled a critical eye at America. Each book had a title that entered the language as metaphor: The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer described the changing and increasingly conformist and “other-directed” American character; The Organization Man by William H. Whyte looked at the corporate executive and the movement of business leadership from rugged individualism to collectivist thinking; The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard took a hard look at the pernicious effects of advertising; and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a novel by Sloan Wilson, highlights the struggle to find purpose in a world of corporate conformity. Of the novel, columnist Bob Greene wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1992: “The title of Sloan Wilson’s bestselling novel became part of the American vernacular—the book was a ground-breaking fictional look at conformity in the executive suite, and it was a piece of writing that helped the nation’s business community start to examine the effects of its perceived stodginess and sameness.”
    PROSUMER. Futurist Alvin Toffler coined prosumer in his classic 1980 work The Third Wave. Toffler’s prosumer combined producer and consumer and referred to individuals who design the products they purchase. More recently, however, prosumer has been given a second meaning as a portmanteau of professional and consumer , indicating people who are amateurs in a given field but covet professional-grade equipment such as industrial-grade kitchen equipment and garden machinery.
    PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC. First coined by sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) in 1904, who saw work as a duty that benefits both the individual and society as a whole. Also, work that is generally good for physical and mental health and has a positive impact on an individual’s well-being.
    PSYCHOBABBLE. Psychological jargon regarded as meaningless. A term created by Richard D. Rosen , novelist who first used it in a 1975 article in the Boston Phoenix : “We are living, practically no one has to be reminded, in a therapeutic age. The sign in every storefront reads: ‘Psychobabble spoken here.’ ” Rosen is also credited with hatching the term psychobabbler for one who uses the jargon. The suffix -babble is used for the most negative and obfuscatory aspects of jargon. Babble itself started life in the fourteenth century to describe the gurgles and vocables of infants. See also TECHNOBABBLE.
    PUGILIST. A practitioner of the art