h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, Joseph Heller contributed the phrase Catch 22 to the English language. (The doctor could stop you flying combat missions if you were crazy, but you had to ask him to do so. If you asked him to stop you flying combat missions it proved you weren't crazy. Catch 22).

Who else - apart from Shakespeare - has added new concepts to the language like that?

George Orwell;
a)Room 101; which contained your worst nightmare
b)Big Brother is watching you

Umm... OK that's me all out. I'll come back when I think of some more

Yup - particularly Big Brother. And then there is 'Orwellian' to describe BB.

agcB

I'm afraid I can't say anything about english concepts, but there's a beautyful belgian one (it's the same in Dutch and in French):
Bob
Bob was the center of a big ad-campaign against driving while you're drunk. This Bob-person was the one who wouldn't drink at a party and drive the car for his mates. These ads were really effective and so, in Belgium, when someone says:
'I'm Bob tonight', this means he's going to stay sober for the rest of the day.

The Bob campaign reminds me of that great "If you see Sid tell him" advertising campaign that the Government ran at the end of the 1980s during their privatisation of the utilities. It was though only a short-term catch-on.

As for new phrases I believe Al Gore was responsible for the "Information Superhighway" and Frank Bruno is responsible for "You know what I mean 'arry".

Hello,

Well, doing some research found some interesting bits

Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is responsible for "albatross around his neck" as a term for a burden.

Dickens coined the phrase "hard as nails" in Oliver Twist.

Robert Burns coined "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a-gley"

Shakespeare in Hamlet coined "Brevity is the soul of wit"; he coined other phrases as well ("discretion is the better part of valor", "eaten out of house and home", etc.)...

Tennyson gave us "do or die" in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

I'll post more later...

Yours,
Jake

What's in a name?
(As a nameless horse...)

Hmm, wouldn´t they need to be a bit long lasting. Who remember Bob and Sid 10 years from now.

What about William Gibson´s word Cyberspace? And just the general use of adding Cyber to anything digital.

I refuse to beleive Al Gore thought up 'Information Superhighway' all by his little self!

'Cyberspace' is a good one - what book was it in? It is on my reading list, but I cannot remember what its called.

agcB

Neuromancer?

Its not really a new phrase, but I just thought I'd add the early Australian drink-driving campaign that was particularly effective, "If you drink and drive you are a bloody idiot".

For a while there everybody was saying it. I remember being made to shout it out at a school assembly (though what school kids were doing drinking OR driving is beyond me

There is always quixotic, which comes from Don Quixote. Not that that is a particularly new book or phrase.

I don't know about elsewhere, but I'm fairly certain simulpost orginated on this site (perhaps as symlpost) and is used widely in forums here. I'm fairly sure I was around when it was... I'll have to go back and look at some of my ancient conversations if they ever get unmoderated...

Bloody 'ell Ermine, that IS something to Dance about. I am SERIOUSLY impressed.

agcB

I might even have come up with it myself but as it was about 18 months ago so I'm not really sure....and kind of doubt it. I do know I was in a lot of conversations with that problem though.

A google search on simulpost didn't find many hits, and at least half seemed to be definitely less than a year old - hard to tell about the others. 4 out of the 20 seem to be related to a conversation about the game 'Mornington Crescent', and some others are certainly h2g2 related, though on different websites.

I suppose that since the word 'simulcast' was already in usage, albeit in rather a different context, there may have been some kind of memetic attractor effect at work which would tend to drag 'simultaneous posting' down to a single word.
It would be very interesting if someone at h2g2 could find the first usage of the word on the site.

Then there's duplipost, as well.

J M Barrie invented the name 'Wendy' in Peter Pan.

A couple of televisual ones that spring to mind include "Dalek", now in the Oxford English Dictionary apparently and, of course, invented by Terry Nation for Doctor Who, TARDIS, from the same show and often used to refer to ladies handbags.
Also, would Holmsian count, as in, acting like Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character?

Don't forget the word 'robot', coined by Isaac Asimov.