Making up language

Words that were invented by fiction writers, and now we all use them

Image: yeonhee

Sometimes, preexisting words just don’t cut it for writers. So they invent new ones. That was the case for terms like utopia, robot, and nerd. Whether they grew to be used in philosophical texts or on playgrounds, they have certainly entered our vocabulary. Let’s take a look at 11 examples!

Image: Jamie Street

The word has been many things, from a schoolyard insult to a badge of honor for having certain interests. It first appeared in Dr. Seuss’s 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, where a strange creature called a "Nerd" appears among other fanciful beasts.

Seuss didn’t define it as brainy or awkward, but within a few years, the word was popping up in slang to describe socially inept people or bookworms.

Image: Shahrooz Shekaraubi

Today, when we say "cyberspace," we mean the intangible digital world we enter when we go online. But the word was coined by sci-fi writer William Gibson in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome.

Gibson later famously described cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination" shared by billions of connected users. The term predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade, yet it foresaw the immersive, sometimes overwhelming, reality of living digitally.

Image: Markus Winkler

Today, when we say we have "debunked" a myth, we mean that we have exposed it as false. The word itself, however, originated as a literary invention in 1923, coined by American writer William E. Woodward in his book Bunk.

Woodward used debunk to mean stripping nonsense, or "bunk" of its dignity, a definition that closely aligns with how the word is still used today.

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Today, we picture robots as everything from Roombas to humanoid androids, but the word itself dates back to a 1920 Czech play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek.

The term comes from robota, meaning "forced labor" or "drudgery." In the play, however, the "robots" were not mechanical but biological constructs, closer to what we might now call clones. Both the term and the concept spread quickly across Europe and the United States, reaching the vocabulary of more and more writers.

Image: Miguel Valencia

When we say something is "utopic," we mean it’s impossibly ideal. The term "utopia" was coined by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 book Utopia, where he described an imaginary island society with perfect laws, harmony, and equality.

But the trick was in the name: in Greek, ou-topos means "no place" while eu-topos means "good place." The word took off quickly, giving us not only "utopia" but also its darker twin, "dystopia," which would dominate much of modern literature.

Image: Michelle Baker

Few words sound as delightful as what they mean, and "serendipity" is one of them. It refers to a happy accident, a lucky discovery made while looking for something else.

The term was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, a British writer and politician, inspired by a Persian fairy tale titled The Three Princes of Serendip. In the story, the princes are constantly making discoveries "by accident and sagacity."

Image: De an Sun

Fans of Harry Potter know Lumos as the spell that lights the tip of a wand. J. K. Rowling coined the word by drawing on Latin roots, such as lumen, meaning "light."

"Lumos" has since slipped into everyday use to the point that some smartphone voice assistants recognize it as a command to turn on a device’s flashlight.

Image: Andres Iga

The word hobbit instantly evokes images of small, hairy-footed inhabitants of the Shire, thanks to J. R. R. Tolkien. A trained philologist with a deep fascination for languages, Tolkien coined numerous terms, including hobbit and mithril, that have since entered popular culture.

The word became widely recognized even beyond The Lord of the Rings fan base. While hobbit originally referred to a fictional race in Tolkien’s legendarium, it is now sometimes used informally to evoke something small, cozy, or diminutive in character.

Image: Gaelle Marcel

Today, we use tween to describe the awkward stage between childhood and adolescence, typically covering ages 9 to 12. The word itself, however, traces back to J. R. R. Tolkien, who first introduced the idea of "tweens."

In The Fellowship of the Ring, hobbits in their "tweens" were those between 20 and 33; no longer teenagers, but not yet considered fully adult in hobbit society. Marketers later borrowed the catchy term to describe human preteens, and it stuck.

Image: CHI CHEN

The word "gossip" feels inseparable from modern life. Yet it began as the Old English term godsibb, meaning a "godparent" or a close, trusted companion. It was Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, who helped nudge the meaning toward talk and chatter.

Over time, the term drifted further, shifting from "companion" to "idle talk" and, eventually, to its modern association with rumor and speculation.

Image: Sarah Kilian

We all know what it means to be a butterfingers: clumsy, prone to dropping things, with hands seemingly as slippery as if coated in butter. This playful insult is often credited to Charles Dickens, who used it in his novel The Pickwick Papers to mock a character’s poor grip on objects.

Jobs nearly gone

These 10 jobs are almost gone. Do you remember them?

When businesses are forced to shut down or completely change the way they operate as technology moves forward, pieces of everyday life are left behind. Not only does this affect old traditions that were attached to those businesses, but also the people who were linked to these industries. There was a time when your milk was delivered by the milkman, or when, to make a call, you had to speak to a telephone operator. Let’s take a trip to the past and see some jobs that had to adapt, and others that simply disappeared over time.

Going to the supermarket or the convenience store when you need dairy products is what most of us do, but life was a little different throughout much of the 20th century, when refrigerators weren’t as common, and grocery stores weren't as big. If you wanted milk, you had to call the milkman.

The milkman was a trusted member of every community, and his job was to deliver fresh milk directly to customers early in the morning several days a week. People would leave their empty bottles at their doorstep, and sometime in the morning, after some familiar glass bottles clinking, the milkman would have replaced them.

Many people would remember the delivery boy on his bike and his canvas bag full of newspapers. If you were a teenager looking to make some extra cash during most of the 20th century, being a part-time newspaper delivery boy was a great choice.

Getting the newspaper at your doorstep used to be essential, so these kids carried a lot of responsibility. The newspaper was, for the vast majority of people, the primary source of reliable information. But the job, as it is traditionally remembered, is almost completely gone due to the rise of the digital era.

In a world where cell phones can do everything from calling your kids and texting to streaming a movie anywhere, thinking about the important role telephone operators played feels so far away in time. Making a call in the late 19th century and most of the 20th century was nothing like today.

Telephone operators were responsible for manually connecting different calls by plugging cables into switchboards in order to help callers reach whoever they were trying to speak to. They were the human link that made the entire system work and enabled communication across cities, states, and countries.

When, in order to watch a movie we didn’t physically own, we had to rent it, video store clerks were necessary. But their job was much more than just ringing you up. They would recommend movies for the family and always keep you up to date about new releases. Sometimes you could even show up and tell them what type of film you liked, and they would give you some advice on what to rent. With the downfall of video rental stores, most of these positions disappeared.

Before E-ZPass and cashless tolling, we would have to fully stop at highway toll plazas, roll down the window, have a little chat with the toll collector, and hand him cash to continue traveling. But besides charging you, toll collectors were very helpful when GPS and the internet weren’t a thing, as they often served as the first point of contact when you needed directions or some sort of assistance.

Once states modernized their highways, these jobs were gradually removed.

Planning your vacations looked very different a few decades ago. Typically, you would meet up with your travel agent, and they would help you with almost every detail of your trip. People didn’t have the internet and websites where they could handle all of this themselves as easily as it is today, so the travel agents booked flights, hotels, cruises, rental cars, everything you can think of.

They were essential for a well-organized trip and helped make things much simpler. You can still find some traditional travel agents, though it is not nearly as common as it used to be.

Operating an elevator now involves simply walking into it and pressing a button. But until the 1950s and part of the 1960s, elevators were a lot more complicated, and you needed specific skills to use them. Part of the common experience of using an elevator was greeting the operator and telling them where you were going, so they could make sure you had a safe ride to your floor. They would often wear smart uniforms and be very courteous with passengers.

How good or bad your experience at the movies was depended a lot on the projectionist. When there were no digital files, the projectionists were the ones responsible for operating the film projectors — but this involved many more tasks than just hitting "play."

Projectionists loaded large reels of film and had to constantly monitor the equipment, swap reels when necessary, make sure the movie was focused, the sound synchronized, and that it played smoothly from beginning to end. After theatres moved away from 35mm film projectors to digital ones, the need for specialized projectionists declined significantly.

Without typesetters, the printing industry couldn’t function. When computers hadn’t yet revolutionized the communications business, typesetters were the ones arranging individual metal letters in order to prepare text for printing: newspapers, magazines, books, advertisements, etc.

Typesetters had to be skilled to know how to organize the entire layout of a page to make it accurate and appealing for readers. And even the smallest typo could mean a lot of extra work to fix it by hand.

The term "human computer" may sound a little odd, but before we had computers as we know them now, companies would hire very smart mathematicians to perform complex calculations by hand — using pencil and paper!

The tasks they carried out were essential to science, playing a crucial role in many of the 20th century’s greatest achievements, like the Space Race. Human computers working for NASA were responsible for calculating everything from rocket trajectories to spacecraft orbits.