Claim for origin of "Cruisazy"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Grant Barrett wrote:

> And then there's the "bundt pan" guy. How can you tell a grieving
> family that their patriarch's one supposedly noteworthy
> accomplishment amounts to showing up at the trademark office about a
> half-century after the cake, pan, and name already existed? (Obits,
> in fact, are a large source of wrong coinage attributions.)

I have been interested to see that the claim that John W. Tukey coined the
term "software," which was headlined in Tukey's New York Times obit and
got worldwide publicity, has held up over the years.  The Times picked up
the claim from an article I wrote, in which I went out on a limb in
asserting Tukey as the coiner based on somewhat limited evidence.  The
claim was furiously contested by a management consultant in California who
maintained he had used the term five years before Tukey but was never able
to produce a shred of evidence.  I regret that I never contacted Tukey to
ask him if he thought he coined it; my article appeared a few months
before his death, and I am not sure whether he was aware of it.

Fred Shapiro


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