Minting Language

It’s not often that a word coined as a result of a competition becomes part of the language, but "scofflaw" did. In 1924, during Prohibition, banker Delcevare King of Quincy, Massachusetts announced a contest to coin a word to describe “a lawless drinker”. The prize was $200 in gold (about $5,000 today). 

Delcevare King, was a prominent member of Boston Republican society in the early 20th century. His father, Theophilus King, was a Quincy philanthropist and president of the Granite Trust Company; the younger King would eventually rise to that position as well. King seems to have combined firm moral convictions with a jolly clubbish spirit. He was vice president of the Massachusetts chapter of the Anti-Saloon League, an officer of the Watch and Ward society (the anti-vice organization whose activities inspired the ironic slogan “Banned in Boston”), and active throughout his life in a dizzying number of other local organizations, from the Church Attendance Council to the Rod and Gun Club. A bon vivant for a good cause, he played Santa Claus every year for tenement children and was master of ceremonies at the famed free-speech venue the Ford Hall Forum.

In early January 1924, it was reported that, in support of the three-year-old national policy of Prohibition, King would award $200 in gold to the person who invented the best word to denounce a violator of the 18th Amendment. “I do seek a word which will stab awake the conscience of the drinker...and stab awake the public conscience to the fact that such lawless drinking is, in the words of President Harding, ‘a menace to the republic itself,’” King said, according to the Globe.

Along with two other judges, also from “dry” society circles, King received more than 20,000 entries. They included “boozshevic,” “contralaw,” “klinker,” “lawjacker,” “slacklaw,” and “wetocrat.”

In the end, two people independently suggested “scofflaw,” winning $100 apiece—Henry Irving Dale of Andover and Kate L. Butler of Dorchester, who dreamed it up while on a train returning from vacation in New Haven. King described his criteria for the selection: He was looking for a word of no more than one or two syllables; starting with “s,” “such words having a sting”; and applicable to any legal violation.

The editors of the Harvard Advocate, a student magazine, promptly proposed a $25 prize for words describing a “dry,” or a Prohibitionist. (“The [Advocate] editors wish it understood,” the Globe wrote in February 1924, “that they are ‘wet,’ but are not trying to encourage the violation of any laws.”) Among the more than 2,200 entries were “fear-beer,” “suds-hate,” “jug-buster,” and the winner, sent in by Katherine Greene Welling of New York City: “spigot-bigot.” The most common response: “Delcevare.”