sometimes they do stuff like this..
I have an entry in the wwftd list for the word plunderbund, in which I state that it was coined by Adlai Stevenson.
My source was
Stevensons: A Biography of an American Family.
In reply to:
Throughout the campaign, Stevenson one-liners stung: we will clean house of "Greed, Grime and Green and the state house gang." He called the governor dirty names: "Bertie's Boy," "McCarthy" Green, and "Governor Greed." He coined a new word, "plunderbund," to describe Green's malfeasance. He filled a black notebook with alliterative slams—"perfidious Pete," "Dwight the blight," "Pete—the man who never said no to a payroller and never said yes to honest government." He was funny, self-deprecatory, and, especially in the beginning, long-winded and long-worded. His comment that Illinois had game wardens who had never been closer to a quail than "Ananias to the truth" sent some listeners to their dictionaries and others to an understanding that this candidate was not one of "the boys." Later the gibe reappeared in a more populist form as more "game wardens than rabbits."
this was during the gubernatorial campaign of 1948.
ACK--augh--argh--grr! What happened?? Are we going to find out that Adlai only thought he coined it, or what?
meanwhile, OED2 has the earliest citation for plunderbund dated 1914; note that it is only attributed to a publication and not an individual:
1914 Voice of People (New Orleans) 8 Jan. 1/1 The whole force of the Texan plunderbund.. are howling at the heels of the dauntless army of workers.
now in 1914 Adlai would have been, what, fourteen years old? and then he saved his coinage for just the right occasion, 34 years later -- all the while others were using it now and then?
something is amiss here. someone suggested to me that perhaps it was Adlai Stevenson, Sr. who coined it, but that seems to be a frivolous notion; the Stevenson biography clearly attributes it to Adlai II in 1948. it seems more likely that the word was still little heard after 34 years; and with Adlai's penchant for using the odd sesquipedalian word, somewhere along the line an assumption was made.
ofttimes the lexicographer gets caught up in this sort of detective work.
(I'd be happy to see any new or better information on the origins of plunderbund. : )
NB: I am not a real lexicographer; I only play one on the internet.
one final note before I leave off..
I found this in the 4th edition of Mencken's The American Language, published in 1937. It's from the vastly edited (as you'd expect) The Language Today section, so unfortunately this can't be found in the 2nd (1921) edition available online. Mencken writes here of German loan words.
The suffixes -heimer and -bund had brief vogues in 1900 or thereabout, but the former survives only in wiseheimer and the latter only in plunderbund and moneybund, the former of which is listed in "Webster's New International Dictionary". (1934) [This would be the oft-cited W2; plunderbund of course maintains in W3]
additional notes;
- moneybund obviously didn't make the grade
- we do have several other -bunds, but these probably come via alternate routes; moribund for example comes via Latin moribundus -- further research is left as an exercise for the student.
NB: I am not a real lexicographer; I only play one on the internet.
Well played tsuwm.
You can't get away with leaving off on that, tsuwm. What, please, are the meanings of "heimer" and "bund", and why were they so popular around 1900? I'll guess that the use of German was the result of the very large German population at the time, and I'll further speculate that the World Wars put an end to it. (I know it put an end to all things German in my father's family. Well, except for the beer.)
heimer (as in heimat) is almost untranslatable.
heimat is 'homeland' but not in a nationalist way, more like this is my little peice of earth, my place were i am at home.
a wizenheimer is local wit. sassy, but not in the psuedo sophisticated way kids are on TV, but the way kid really are--mostly dumb, and whiney, and boring, but occationally there is a kid who isn't trying to be sassy, but asks (or says) all the wrong thing at the right time..
a social idiot savant..
Nice coinage, Helen. One runs across those at online message boards, too, and they're usually not kids!
-heimer is apparently a common German name ending (e.g., Oppenheimer) meaning someone from the home of... wiseheimer/wisenheimer/weisenheimer <> wiseacre, wise guy
In the first ed. of Mencken (1919), he wrote, Several years ago -heimer had a great vogue in slang, and was rapidly done to death. But wiseheimer remains in colloquial use as a facetious synonym for smart-aleck, and after awhile it may gradually acquire dignity.
bund is G. for association or league. in English, OED2 has..
A league, confederacy, or association; spec. (a) the confederation of German states; (b) a Jewish Social Democratic workers' organization in Eastern Europe, founded in 1897; (c) U.S., an American pro-Nazi organization founded in 1936.
given this history, use of Bund/bund itself is fraught with some peril.
OH! Homeland; wiseacre--cool! I have wondered, casually, where the word wiseacre came from; it just seemed kind of odd. I am now going to assume it came from this!
From The Devil's Dictionary:
LEXICOGRAPHER, n.
A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor -- whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" -- although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion -- the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.
God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form,"
And lexicographers arose, a swarm!
Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,
And catalogued each garment in a book.
Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:
"Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise
And scan the list, and say without compassion:
"Excuse us -- they are mostly out of fashion."
Sigismund Smith
I am not so lost in
lexicography as to
forget that words are
the daughters of earth,
and that things are the
sons of heaven.
—Preface to Dictionary (1755)
Samuel Johnson