"As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once," wrote the author of The Great Gatsby in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf, the wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Given that his fame "was for many years based less on his work than his personality—the society playboy, the speakeasy alcoholic whose career had ended in 'crack-up,' the brilliant young writer whose early literary success seemed to make his life something of a romantic idyll," he found himself well placed to offer the language a new "taste of Roaring Twenties excess."
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