There have been many influential people that have changed the way we live. Be it the great scientist Albert Einstein or the famous chemist Alfred Nobel, all these people with great minds have occasionally come up with something that has made our everyday life easier.
Inventors’ Day is celebrated on 11th February in the US to honor such great minds. Besides celebrating the contribution of these great scientists or mathematicians, we must also focus on celebrating the contribution of those inventors who have enriched our vocabulary with their language. In this post, we are going to take a look at some popular English words and their inventors–Authors.
Blatant
The word Blatant first found mention in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1596). The poet talks about a ‘blatant beast’ in the poem; thus, he becomes the apparent inventor of the word. As per Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Spenser used it as a symbol of defamation. It was a nickname of the thousand-tongued monster created of Cerberus and Chimaera.
Cyberspace
OED puts cyberspace as ‘the space of virtual reality.’ In other words, it is a hypothetical environment where electronic communication takes place. William Gibson in 1981 while filming a short science fiction story ‘Burning Chrome’ referred to the compound noun, which was later published in Omni magazine in 1982. Today it is used to denote futuristic concepts.
Robot
A noun, robot symbolizes a machine that resembles a human and can automatically replicate certain human functions. Derived from a Czech word “robota” meaning ‘forced labor,’ it was coined by Czech author Karel Čapek when he used it in his science fiction play called R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The word made it to English dictionary in the early 1920s.
Sensuous
Invented by John Milton, the adjective signifies ‘of the senses’ derived from ‘affecting the senses,’ which avoids its association with the current word sensual. First used in 1641, sensuous appeared in Johnson’s dictionary.
Superman
The world associates the word with a Superhero character made famous through comics, animated TV series, and movies. However, much before all these things, an Irish writer George Bernard Shaw translated the German word “Übermensch” and called it Superman. In 1883, the well-known German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used the word in a tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra” to denote the concept of ‘an ideal superior man of the future who transcends conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values.’
Other English versions of Übermensch include Overman and beyond man. Currently, the word is used to signify an almost invincible superhero that has the power to fly.
Final Words
These impressive words leave us wondering, what if these famous authors did not invent these words? Would we still have a superhero named “Superman”? Moreover, translating words of different languages is not an easy task; you need experts to help you out. Thus, get in touch with language translators during your overseas trips 888-670-3369.