Claim for origin of "Cruisazy"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 10:29:36AM -0500, Grant Barrett wrote:
> Not only is it rarely worth getting into the who-said-it-first
> rubbish, unless the coiner is already a person of note (and thus more
> likely to be an efficient propagator of a new term), but these claims
> are usually wrong. I had a woman a couple of weeks ago claim she
> coined "cliterati" in 2000, when there's easy-to-find evidence it
> dates to at least as early as 1988.

Well, it doesn't mean that the claim is "wrong" as such--it's
perfectly possible that this woman _did_ "coin" _cliterati_ in
2000, unaware that others had coined it too, twelve or more
years earlier. Like Grant I'm often accosted by people
claiming to have coined something or other, and often their
claims are believable (i.e. they're not trying to pass off
someone else's known coinage as their own, but rather they
truly came up with these things themselves). But with so many
words, particular in the families of
obvious-combinations-of-formatives and predictable-puns, these
things can be repeatedly coined over and over again, and at
some point they can gain traction and then you'll have a
zillion people me-firsting you.

We can't underestimate the feelings of pride the G.P. can get
from "coining" a term. I've had several long exchanges with
writers who want to put onto their resumes the fact that
they're the first cited author in OED for a term, even if it's
a straightforward figurative extension.

It would be nice if some of these were genuinely creative.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED