of boxing; a boxer, a fighter. This is one of the many words debuted by Pierce Egan (1772–1849), the man who can be regarded as the first beat sports reporter and the first to apply slang (some of his own making) to the low sports—boxing, cockfighting, bullbaiting. 6
PUNDUSTRY. The pundit industry. The term was coined by columnist Gene Weingarten in his cover story for the Washington Post magazine for March 23, 2008, entitled “Cruel and Unusual Punishment,” an allusion to the fact that he forced himself to watch five televisions simultaneously, each containing a different political pundit opining on the same subject. The pundustry as Weingarten saw it: “There are too many voices, competing too hard, fighting for attention, ranting, redundant, random. The dissemination of fact and opinion is no longer the sole province of people and institutions with the money to buy network monopolies or ink by the ton, as it was a half-century ago when information was delivered to us, for better or worse, like the latest 1950s-era cigarette: filtered, for an illusion of safety. Now, all is out of control. Everyone with a computer is a potential pundit; anyone with a video camera can be on a screen.”
PUSHMI-PULLYU. An imaginary creature resembling a llama or antelope, but with a head at either end of the body, pointing away from the torso, so that the creature always faces in two directions at once. It was created in 1922 by British children’s author Hugh Lofting (1886–1947) for his book Doctor Dolittle, in which he noted that “pushmi-pullyus are now extinct . . . They had no tail, but a head at each end, and sharp horns on each head . . . Only one half of him slept at a time. The other head was always awake—and watching.” The name of the beast is often invoked to describe policies, e.g., “The constitutional division of war powers is not intended to produce a pushmi-pullyu, with two minds to make up.” 7
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* The word was coined earlier for the biography of an illness—a true pathology. Oates never claimed to have coined the word—just that she gave it a secondary meaning.
* The first line of this poem is taken from the first line of John Donne’s “The Bait . ”
* For the author this is one of those terms that provide more heat than light and that he suspects is a major trigger of migraine headaches among other nonacademics along with deconstructuralism, poststructuralism, and existentialism.
R
RADICAL CHIC. Created by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay about fund-raising events, hosted by the rich and famous, for the revolutionary Black Panthers. The term became generalized to refer to the support of radical causes by fashionable and/or wealthy patrons as evidence of their trendiness.
RATOMORPHIC. Arthur Koestler ’s term for a view of human behavior modeled on the behavior of laboratory rats and other experimental animals.
RESISTENTIALISM. Name for a mock-academic theory to describe “seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects.” In other words, a war is being fought between humans and inanimate objects, and all the little annoyances objects inflict on people throughout the day are battles between the two. The term was coined by British humorist Paul Jennings in a piece titled “Report on Resistentialism,” published in the Spectator in April 1948 and reprinted in the New York Times and elsewhere. The slogan of resistentialism is “Les choses sont contre nous”—”Things are against us.” In an essay on the subject in the New York Times for September 21, 2003, Charles Harrington Elster called resistentialism “a brilliant send-up of Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophy of existentialism.”
RETROMINGENT. Urinating backward. This term was not coined by Ben Bradlee , executive editor of the Washington Post , but was given new life when he employed it as a term of derogation in a letter to pesky media critic Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media. In the spring of 1978,
PUNDUSTRY. The pundit industry. The term was coined by columnist Gene Weingarten in his cover story for the Washington Post magazine for March 23, 2008, entitled “Cruel and Unusual Punishment,” an allusion to the fact that he forced himself to watch five televisions simultaneously, each containing a different political pundit opining on the same subject. The pundustry as Weingarten saw it: “There are too many voices, competing too hard, fighting for attention, ranting, redundant, random. The dissemination of fact and opinion is no longer the sole province of people and institutions with the money to buy network monopolies or ink by the ton, as it was a half-century ago when information was delivered to us, for better or worse, like the latest 1950s-era cigarette: filtered, for an illusion of safety. Now, all is out of control. Everyone with a computer is a potential pundit; anyone with a video camera can be on a screen.”
PUSHMI-PULLYU. An imaginary creature resembling a llama or antelope, but with a head at either end of the body, pointing away from the torso, so that the creature always faces in two directions at once. It was created in 1922 by British children’s author Hugh Lofting (1886–1947) for his book Doctor Dolittle, in which he noted that “pushmi-pullyus are now extinct . . . They had no tail, but a head at each end, and sharp horns on each head . . . Only one half of him slept at a time. The other head was always awake—and watching.” The name of the beast is often invoked to describe policies, e.g., “The constitutional division of war powers is not intended to produce a pushmi-pullyu, with two minds to make up.” 7
----
* The word was coined earlier for the biography of an illness—a true pathology. Oates never claimed to have coined the word—just that she gave it a secondary meaning.
* The first line of this poem is taken from the first line of John Donne’s “The Bait . ”
* For the author this is one of those terms that provide more heat than light and that he suspects is a major trigger of migraine headaches among other nonacademics along with deconstructuralism, poststructuralism, and existentialism.
R
RADICAL CHIC. Created by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay about fund-raising events, hosted by the rich and famous, for the revolutionary Black Panthers. The term became generalized to refer to the support of radical causes by fashionable and/or wealthy patrons as evidence of their trendiness.
RATOMORPHIC. Arthur Koestler ’s term for a view of human behavior modeled on the behavior of laboratory rats and other experimental animals.
RESISTENTIALISM. Name for a mock-academic theory to describe “seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects.” In other words, a war is being fought between humans and inanimate objects, and all the little annoyances objects inflict on people throughout the day are battles between the two. The term was coined by British humorist Paul Jennings in a piece titled “Report on Resistentialism,” published in the Spectator in April 1948 and reprinted in the New York Times and elsewhere. The slogan of resistentialism is “Les choses sont contre nous”—”Things are against us.” In an essay on the subject in the New York Times for September 21, 2003, Charles Harrington Elster called resistentialism “a brilliant send-up of Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophy of existentialism.”
RETROMINGENT. Urinating backward. This term was not coined by Ben Bradlee , executive editor of the Washington Post , but was given new life when he employed it as a term of derogation in a letter to pesky media critic Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media. In the spring of 1978,
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