Words With a Known Author

Most of the vocabulary on this site arrived without an author. A word appears in a community, spreads, and by the time anybody writes it down the question of who said it first has no answer. These four are the exceptions, and they are the reason this catalogue prints provenance at all.

Neutrois is the cleanest case: Holly A. Burnham coined it in 1995 as a description of herself, before there was language for what she meant, and built it out of French rather than the Greek and Latin everything around it uses. Juxera has a name, a month and a matched pair, coined by the Tumblr user Wulfgendur in July 2014 alongside its near-male counterpart. Transgender belongs here for a different reason: the physician John Oliven used it in a medical text in 1965, which makes the attribution firm and the meaning wrong, since the word he used is narrower than the umbrella it now names. Genderqueer is the weakest attribution of the four and is included to mark the edge, since Riki Wilchins is the name attached to putting it in print in the mid-1990s without that amounting to a coinage. The set is ordered from the firmest attribution to the loosest. It excludes every term whose coinage is merely dated, which is most of them, and it excludes the culture-specific categories, which are older than the practice of recording such things.