Today I saw a book review of a Rebecca Solnit book. The reviewer credited Solnit for inventing the term “mansplaining.” I looked further, and lots of reviewers do the same.
And there is a Mary Sue article that credits Solnit with coining the term.
It was Solnit’s 2008 essay “Men Explain Things To Me” that prompted the creation of the new word. But it was not Solnit who created the catchy term, as she says plainly in the introduction to the piece as collected in the book of essays she released in 2015. Which I read. And she says the same thing elsewhere. And a CTRL+F search reveals that no permutation of the word “mansplain” appears in the essay.
I briefly considered saying something about the misattribution. And then I was like, wait a second…