10 Words and Phrases Popularized by Presidents

As the first U.S. president, George Washington not only defined the role of the chief executive, he also coined certain words to explain elements of the presidency such as the commander in chief’s period of time in office, which he called an “administration.” Washington introduced the new use of the word in his Farewell Address in 1796 when he wrote, “In reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error.” The Oxford English Dictionary credits Washington with the first evidence of the usage of 32 words—including “average” and “indoors.” As Dickson notes, however, that doesn’t mean the first president coined the terms, only that his writings contained the earliest recorded instances of them, in part because his papers were among the few to survive from the 1700s.

2. First Lady—Zachary Taylor In the early decades of the United States, the president’s wife was commonly referred to as the “presidentress”—quite a mouthful. Not until Zachary Taylor eulogized Dolley Madison in 1849 did that begin to change. “She will never be forgotten because she was truly our First Lady for a half-century,” the twelfth president wrote of the widow of the fourth president. The title eventually grew in usage to encompass all presidential wives.

3. Founding Fathers—Warren G. Harding
Today’s common collective reference to the Revolutionary-era statesmen who drafted the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution had an unlikely start in a 1918 speech given by then Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding to the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution in which he said, “It is good to meet and drink at the fountains of wisdom inherited from the founding fathers of the Republic.” Harding, who had a penchant for alliteration, wielded the term again during his 1920 presidential campaign, and it soon supplanted the usage of “framers” to describe America’s Revolutionary leaders, which Dickson says changed the way we now view them. “The use of ‘framers’ connotes a much more diverse group, while ‘founding fathers’ sounds like they were this group of men walking in lockstep, and of course the reality is they had huge disagreements on voting, slavery and other issues.”

4. Iffy—Franklin D. Roosevelt
Although Franklin D. Roosevelt was a patrician with a very high-class way of speaking, Dickson notes that he wasn’t afraid to include slang in his linguistic arsenal, such as the use of the word “iffy” to describe uncertainties or Supreme Court decisions with which he disagreed. Roosevelt commonly swatted away hypothetical queries from reporters at press conferences by saying, “That’s an iffy question.”

 5. Lunatic Fringe—Theodore Roosevelt                                                                                       
Dickson says that Theodore Roosevelt—whose contributions to the popular lexicon included “bully pulpit,” “muckraker,” “loose cannon” and “pack rat”—was the most masterful president at coining new phrases. “So many of his constructions are still around and still have his imprint on them. He just seems to have been the most colorful presidential contributor to the language,” Dickson says. After leaving the White House, Roosevelt added to his linguistic legacy when in his review of the avant-garde Armory Show in 1913 the unimpressed former president wrote, “The lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.” The term soon crossed over from the art world to the political arena to characterize those with beliefs well outside the mainstream.

6. Mulligan—Dwight D. Eisenhower
America may have liked Ike, but not as much as Dwight D. Eisenhower loved golf. The duffer-in-chief even popularized a term now in common parlance on golf courses around the world. In 1947, the Washington Post reported that after hitting a wayward tee shot, Eisenhower invoked executive privilege to hit another ball without taking a penalty. “General Eisenhower got away from the first tee gracefully on his second shot, taking advantage of the rule of ‘Mulligans’ to smite one far down the middle after hooking his first shot into the trees,” the newspaper reported. Eisenhower’s do-overs became common practices during his White House days, and so did the use of “mulligan.”