Rasputin, Russian for debauchee, is the “acquired name” of Grigory Yefimovich Novykh, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, “mystic and faith healer who held sway over court of Nicholas II of Russia.” Wells’s seems to be the earliest recorded example of Rasputin used figuratively for anyone “felt to have an insidious and corrupting influence.”
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“My professional gifts give me a kind of Rasputin hold on one or two exalted families.” Lurve may be based on the rhoticity – the pronunciation of “the letter r … after vowels,” says Dialect Blog – of some British accents. While lurve, an alteration of love, may seem like a modern term, it has long been a British colloquialism, says the OED, first recorded as a verb in Wells’s writings in 1908, and as a noun in 1937. “I am pleading the cause of a woman, a woman I lurve, sorr-a noble woman-misunderstood.” In a way, he himself became an invisible man. From an article by Eugene Kane in The Milwaukee Journal, September 7, 1986:Īfter that experience, I tried to find other writings by Ellison, but was frustrated by the lack of his books at libraries or bookstores. Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, was published in 1952. Wells’s novella, The Invisible Man, was published in 1897, and the term, invisible man, is now used literally and figuratively to mean someone who cannot be seen or is willingly unseen. Chaplin, “ Russians Friendly, But Just Try to Get Any Military Secrets!” St. “I have walked through Moscow’s snowy streets and felt that I must be an invisible man as the pedestrians passed me by with apparently unseeing eyes.” X-rays, “relatively high-energy photon having a wavelength in the approximate range from 0.01 to 10 nanometers,” were discovered in 1895.
Wells’s heat-ray weapon, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, was a precursor to the ray gun, a staple in science fiction which originated around 1923. “In the road lay a group of three charred bodies close together, struck dead by the Heat-Ray and here and there were things that people had dropped–a clock, a slipper, a silver spoon, and the like poor valuables.” While the term had been in use since about 1875, says the OED, it was in Charles Howard Hinton’s 1880 article, “ What Is the Fourth Dimension?” that the idea of time as the fourth dimension was first implied, and in Wells’s The Time Machine that an explicit connection was made between time and the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension refers to “time regarded as a coordinate dimension and required by relativity theory, along with three spatial dimensions, to specify completely the location of any event.” There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it.” It is only another way of looking at Time. “Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it.
Real-life atom bombs were developed in the 1930s. Later terms include the shortened atom bomb – about 1921, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – and even shorter A-bomb (about 1945). “His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action.”Īn atomic bomb is “a nuclear weapon in which enormous energy is released by nuclear fission.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the phrase atomic bomb was first recorded in the above 1914 work of Wells. Time travel with us as we look back on 10 words and phrases Wells coined or popularized.
Dubbed “The Father of Science Fiction,” Wells was also “a prolific writer in many other genres.” But we know and love him best as the creator behind The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine.
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