Happy Lincoln/Darwin Day!

Today marks the bicentennial of two of the most influential minds of the modern age: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Besides sharing a birthday, Lincoln and Darwin also shared an eloquence with the English language, despite the very different prose styles of their work. In a new book, Angels and Ages, Adam Gopnik argues that this shared eloquence allowed them to impart their world-changing visions. But what about on a more basic level, that of the individual word? What lasting contributions did Lincoln and Darwin make to the English lexicon?

To investigate this question, I did a search of the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to find out which words in the dictionary were first used by either Lincoln or Darwin. Keep in mind that the OED can only tell us the first known use of a word, and this earliest recorded appearance is always subject to revision (or "antedating," as it's known in the lexicography game), unless we know for sure that a person coined a particular word on a particular date. The results, nonetheless, were rather surprising: Darwin contributed the first citations for a whopping 144 words in the OED, and Lincoln only one!

Lincoln is remembered for his immense rhetorical power — phrases like "four score and seven years ago," "the mystic chords of memory," "the better angels of our nature," and "with malice toward none" have been rightfully enshrined in the pantheon of American political oratory. But Lincoln was not a linguistic innovator: he used preexisting words to communicate his ideas forcefully. The only word that the OED credits to him is a facetious one (fittingly, given his keen sense of humor): Michigander, a playful epithet for someone from Michigan. In 1848, he referred to General Lewis Cass as "the great Michigander." Since Cass was said to resemble a goose, Michigander was especially appropriate, combining Michigan with gander. Since Lincoln's time, Michigan natives have embraced Michigander as a somewhat self-effacing term, though they're probably not comparing themselves to geese.

Darwin, on the other hand, was a lexical dynamo, in large part because he needed a revamped vocabulary to map out the new terrain of evolutionary biology. No doubt his most famous contribution to the lexicon is natural selection, a term that he first used in an 1857 letter before elaborating on the concept two years later in The Origin of Species. A related term often attributed to Darwin, survival of the fittest, was not actually his coinage: Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase in his 1864 Principles of Biology, a work that connected Darwin's natural selection to Spencer's economic theories. (Darwin himself borrowed the phrase back in the fifth edition of The Origin of Species, published in 1869.) Phylogeny, referring to the evolutionary development of a species or higher taxonomic group, was also a Darwinian neologism.

Other terms first recorded in Darwin's work had to do with the mechanics of biological descent, such as the verbs interbreed and cross-fertilize. (Darwin wrote a whole treatise in 1876 on "the effects of cross and self-fertilisation in the vegetable kingdom.") He was also the first to write in English about the archaeopteryx, a fossil find that helped bolster his evolutionary theories. (The paleontologist Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer is credited with introducing the Greek-derived term archaeopteryx first in German.)

Darwin imported many foreign words into English in his work as a naturalist. For instance, in his journal recording the famed voyage of the HMS Beagle, he wrote of alfalfa, a Spanish word that ultimately derives from Arabic and Persian. Even more surprisingly, Darwin was the first known English writer to use the Spanish word rodeo, which appeared in a Beagle journal entry after he observed a cattle round-up in central Chile.

Interestingly enough, Darwin was the first known writer to use a word that would come to describe religiously motivated opponents of his theories: in an 1859 letter he wrote, "What a joke it would be if I pat you on the back when you attack some immovable creationists." Creationism, however, had already made an appearance in 1847, in Carl W. Buch's translation of C. R.. Hagenbach's Compendium of the History of Doctrines.

You can find some more examples of Darwin's lexical contributions in the word list that I created here. It's got everything from exophthalmos ("protrusion of the eyeball from the socket") to nutate ("rock, sway, or nod; usually involuntarily"). Who knew Darwin was a pioneer in the evolution of words too?

Update, 2/12/15: Since I wrote this in 2009, new historical research has revealed that Michigander was actually in use well before 1848. On the American Dialect Society mailing list, examples have been shared from 1838 and 1842. And Barry Popik points out that, even though the term was popularized in 1848, it was already in circulation as a putdown of Lewis Cass by the time that Lincoln used it in a speech in the House of Representatives on July 27th of that year. So it would be erroneous to give Lincoln sole credit for coining Michigander.