Nerds Chortle After Creating Pandemonium With Memes In Cyberspace

Written By Danielle Brockmann

Where did that word really come from?

Before the dawn of chat rooms, social media, and memes, new words were documented and circulated via physical books. The term “cyberspace” itself came from a short story written by William Gibson in 1982 called “Burning Chrome”. It is estimated that in Shakespeare’s works there are over 1,700 new words, including names (looking at you, Jessica). Now whether or not these authors actually coined these words or simply were the first person to pen them on paper is up for debate, but surely they were the first to popularize them at a large scale. If you consider that Shakespeare was a playwright, and his audience heard these words during a play, you would assume that some of the audience had to already have some sort of concept of what the words meant. So while we can’t guarantee that these words were truly coined versus simply written down, we do encourage you to add these short stories, novels, plays, and poems to your reading list, to experience a bygone time when these words weren’t as common.

  • “Addiction”: Othello by William Shakespeare (1604)

  • “Big Brother”: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

  • “Blabbermouth”: In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck (1936)

  • “Blatant”: The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser (1590)

  • “Butterfingers”: The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (1836)

  • “Catch-22”: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

  • “Chortle”: Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871)

  • “Co-ed”: Jo’s Boys by Louisa May Alcott (1886)

  • “Factoid”: Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer (1973)

  • “Freelance”: Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (1819)

  • “Gaslighting”: Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton (1938)

  • “Litterbug”: The Litterbug Family by Alice Rush McKeon (1931)

  • “Meme”: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)

  • “Metaverse”: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)

  • “Moody”: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

  • “Nerd”: If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss (1950)

  • “Pandemonium”: Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)

  • “Robot”: R.U.R. by Karel Čapek (1920)

  • “Serendipity”: a letter written by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto) to Horace Mann in 1754, based on the Persian story The Three Princes of Serendip

  • “Swagger”: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (1595)

  • “Tween”: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)

  • “Ultraviolence”: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

  • “Utopia”: Utopia by Thomas More (1516)

Danielle Brockmann
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Women's History Month Reading List