| Bold-faced, with a hyphen and ending in the
adjectival, was coined by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part I, when Lord Talbot,
rescuing his son on a French battlefield, spoke of his "proud desire of
bold-faced Victoria. " It was picked up in the 19th century by typesetters to
describe a type — like Clarendon, Antique or a thick version of Bodoni — that
stood out confidently, even impudently, from the page. The adjective was used in
an 1880 article in The New York Times (we were hyphenated then) : "One
of the handbills" distributed by the Ku Klux Klan, noted a disapproving
reporter, was "printed in bold-faced type on yellow paper". Newspaper gossip columnists in the 30's, to catch the reader's eye, began using this bold type for the names that made news in what was then called "care society" (in contrast to "high" society, whose members claimed to prefer to stay out of those columns). In our time, the typeface metaphor was applied to a set of famous human faces. A fashion reporter — John Duka of The Times — was an early user of the phrase, as he wrote acerbically on Sept. 22, 1981: "At the overheated parties at Calvin Klein's apartment, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman and Studio 54, the boldfaced names said the week had been so crammed that they were feeling 'a little under the breath, you know. ' " Rita Kempley of The Washington Post noted in 1987 the sought-after status of "a boldfaced name in People magazine"; by 1999, Alan Peppard of The Dallas Morning News recalled to Texas Monthly that he began with a "social column," but "now we live in an age of celebrity, and there are very few people who care about what the debutantes are doing. So I call it celebrity, society, famous people, rich people, boldfaced names. " The New York Times, which never had, does not have and is grimly determined never to have a "gossip column" introduced a "people column" in 2001. (When its current editor, Joyce Wadler, took a six-week break recently, she subheaded that item with a self-mocking "Air Kiss! Smooch! Ciao!") The column covers the doings of celebrities, media biggies, fashion plates, show-biz stars, haut-monde notables, perennial personages and others famous for their fame. It's confident, fashionable and modern moniker became the driving force behind the recent popularization of the phrase with the former compound adjective, now an attributive noun: Boldface Names. |