How to coin a phrase

Last year I coined the phrase “raining monkeys and banjos,” and I coined it correctly: I invented a phrase that didn’t exist before. Lately “to coin a phrase” has been jumping out at me when I hear it, because it seems like most people are using it incorrectly–they say “to coin a phrase” when really they’re quoting someone else’s phrase, at best. I had a specific example of incorrect usage (spouted recently by some politician or other) which was what got me thinking about it enough to write this post, but I’ve forgotten what it was. So here’s an example from The Daily Telegraph:

Given London’s importance as an global financial centre, this Commission and its aftermath could also influence the shape of the world economy. British banking reform, to coin a phrase, isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s far more important than that.

Who knows which phrase they even think they’re coining here, given the way those sentences are structured, but they certainly haven’t created anything new.

I set out to write a quick piece about rampant misuse of the phrase, but things got more complicated, as they’re wont to do.

First some background on the origin of the phrase. A coin is a piece of money, and it’s also the process of creating money by stamping metal.^* The verb coin has produced many figurative senses meaning “to create”; the OED includes these definitions:

• esp. in a bad or depreciatory sense: To fabricate, invent, make up (something specious, pretentious, or counterfeit).
• spec. To frame or invent (a new word or phrase); usually implying deliberate purpose; and occasionally used depreciatively, as if the process were analogous to that of the counterfeiter.

The OED cites references to “coining” new words dating back to 1589: “Young schollers not halfe well studied when they come to their friends will seeme to coigne fine wordes out of the Latin.”^† “To coin a phrase,” however, doesn’t appear in print until much later–around 1848.^‡§ A Google Books search turns up examples of “to coin a phrase” dating back to the 1850s, and in the early examples the sense is of creating a new word or expression. For example:

I had heard that he was a reckless rouè–a gambler, a protector of coryphèes,–but I saw no solitary trace of the “man-about-townishness” (allow me to coin a phrase for the nonce) I had long ago learned to expect.^**

The OED does not include any citations of “to coin a phrase” earlier than 1940, by which time a new sense had evolved for the expression: “to coin a phrase, an expression commonly used ironically to introduce a cliché or a banal sentiment.” Their earliest citation illustrates this:

It takes all sorts to make a world, to coin a phrase.^††

The OED’s other two examples of the phrase both fall under this “ironic” sense; the OED therefore does not include any examples of “to coin a phrase” being used to actually coin a new phrase. Since 1940, the meaning has become much less precise, and the phrase is now often used without any irony at all. Sometimes it’s just a marker, used to draw attention to a word or phrase–used in the same way as “so to speak” or “as it were” often are. Sometimes the speakers or writers seem to be intending something along the lines of “to quote a phrase” or “to borrow a phrase” instead.

The example I gave above from The Daily Telegraph is hard to judge (deliberate irony or misuse?), but here are some less-ambiguous examples:^‡‡

While the consequence in terms of political posturing may be distasteful, at least it has so far mitigated (to coin a phrase) the damage that would have been done had the more strident governments’ deeds matched their extravagant words.

Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warning (Penguin, 2009), previewed through Google Books, page unknown

Here there is no irony–and not even a trite phrase to be ironic about. It’s not clear why he wants to draw attention to mitigated.

Clearly, a woman’s “right to choose” is not economically neutral. Unless we find a way to undo Roe and thereby restore our marriage culture and fertility rates, any congressional road map to shore up the economy will prove — to coin a phrase — fruitless.

From an op-ed by Robert W. Patterson in the Washington Examiner

Here “to coin a phrase” is used to draw attention to the pun on “fruitless,” and the sentence begs to be emended to use “as it were” instead. The OED has this charming definition for “as it were”:

(as a parenthetic phrase used to indicate that a word or statement is perhaps not formally exact though practically right) as if it were so, if one might so put it, in some sort

Brad Pasanek, in a great post at The Mind is a Metaphor, adds that “the mood is subjunctive. One would say it, if only he could mean it.” He goes on to note that “the philosopher is much given to hedging claims with an ‘as it were,’” and this is how “to coin a phrase” is often used: to draw attention to a phrase while at the same time distancing oneself from it.

Here are two examples where it’s clear the writer thinks that “coin” means simply “quote” or “use”:

The straw man argument is more use than facts on your planet. Hell, in your analogy, all the jobs should be in China or Mexico. To coin a phrase you employed, “In the real world” they’re not. Different economies of the world do not equate to “Fairness” as you imply sir. Your argument is unsound.

In the comments to an article at The Nation

Do you think the economic “cratering” (to coin a phrase of John McCain’s) will benefit John McCain or Barack Obama on election day?

From an article at United Liberty

The great fount of misinformation^§§ that is The Urban Dictionary includes a novel misinterpretation of “to coin a phrase” (I have not found any examples of the phrase actually being used this way):

A common missconception [sic] is that to ‘Coin’ a phrase means that you are the first person say/write a phrase that is then adopted by the general public.

In fact, to ‘coin a phrase’ is the first person to earn a buck from it – for example: in the press.

Occasionally, though, people still use the phrase correctly. Here’s my favorite of the ones I ran into while researching this, from Chiang Mai Mail:

All you have to do is put the bottle outside the plane for a minute or two, it’s minus 45 or something, enough to freeze the nurglers off a predatory puma, to coin a phrase.

Here the writer has coined not only the phrase “freeze the nurglers off a predatory puma” but also the word nurglers itself, which is pretty easy to deduce the meaning of based on the context.

When I began this post I was expecting to find clear-cut proof that I was right and everyone else (well, a lot of them, anyway) was wrong. And while this is in fact the case, it also turns out that, to coin a phrase, wrong has become right and “to coin a phrase” can mean nearly anything you want it to mean.