The podictionary word for today is blurb:  I see that the word blurb is to be found in the Chambers Dictionary of Eponyms.  Now I’m sure you know that an eponym is a word that is drawn from someone’s name. 

I did the word platonic not too long ago, and it is after Plato.  So according to Chambers, the word blurb comes from the name of Miss Belinda Blurb.  Yet Belinda Blurb is a fictitious character so I wonder if this qualifies as an eponym.  The guy who is credited with inventing the word blurb is Gelett Burgess, a Californian dead these fifty years.  It was he who also penned:

I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one!

Evidently he got so tired of hearing people quote that one back to him that he also wrote:

Ah yes, I wrote The Purple Cow,
I’m sorry now I wrote it;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’ll kill you if you quote it!

In looking for a nice clean definition for what the word blurb means I came across the following at Urbandictionary.com, and it seems to me that this is pretty close to how old Gelett Burgess felt about it.

A blurb is a dose of highly concentrated spin intended to deflect direct perception and critical thought while presenting a desirable or attractive image to the public.
In 1907 Burgess wrote something called Are You a Bromide? And on the cover he had some text that was intended to mock other publications of the day that had taken to writing little testimonials on their covers in an effort to sell more books. 

He called his testimonial a blurb and above it showed a picture of a young woman.  She appears to be shouting and the caption reads “Miss Belinda Blurb in the act of blurbing.”  The Oxford English Dictionary also credits Burgess with the first citation; that was in 1914 for some reason.  As can be seen from the Urbandictionary definition that I read, a blurb today can be understood to apply to many different publicity efforts, but for most of its existence blurb has applied mainly to books.

I think the understood meaning has expanded also from only marketing verbiage to any short description.  Since I have a book coming out in November I have my own blurbs.  One of them I was honoured to get was from Richard Lederer, the co-host of NPR’s A Way With Words.  Richard is a pretty clever wordsmith and A Way With Words often identifies itself as “verbivore central.”  In helping me out with my book and his blurb, he called himself a “blurbivore.” 

I’ll put a picture of Belinda Blurb up on the blog page as well as a link to A Way With Words and yet another link to my book Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology and Trivia.