neologism

After reading The Meaning of Everything, I have much more respect for those "harmless drudges" known as lexicographers. They have to discover not only a word's meaning(s), but delve into its history and etymology, a painstaking, arduous process. An example: who was the first to use the term "postmodern" or "postmodernism," at least in the sense we now understand it, as an attack on Enlightenment-era rationalism and objective epistemology, and the conflation of linguistics and politics?

Over on evangelical outpost, commenter "Puzzled" claims Christian thinker Francis Scheaffer was "one of the very first to use the term, back in 1968." One of the very first apologeticists, perhaps?

Donald Wellman thinks it was a poet.

The work with Charles Olson, for instance, represents an inquiry into the relations between desire construed subjectively and form construed objectively. This work also represents my engagement with the relationship between modernism and the postmodern. He was the first to use the term, "postmodern."

Timothy M. Chester disagrees:

In The Sociological Imagination, C. W. Mills wrote "The modern age is being succeeded by a post-modern period. . .(where) increased rationality may not be assumed to make for increased freedom" (Pp. 166-167). Thus, he was the first to use the term "postmodern" in the sense that we know it today. This paper concerns itself with Mills relationship to this condition. The postmodern orientation involves a rebellion against Enlightenment traditions, however, there are many different strands of postmodernism which may be characterized rebellions agaisnt [sic]different forms of Enlightenment narratives. Thus, the author first distinguishes between skeptical post-structuralism and progressive postmodernism. Using these conceptualizations, the author then makes the case that Mills can be seen as the first progressive postmodernist. Progressive in the sense that he believed truth and subjectivity could be recovered in the postmodern age, a duty which is the responsiblity of the critical intellectual.

Michael Hoover digs even deeper into the detritus of literary history:

According to Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, English artist John Watkins Chapman referred to 'postmodern painting' around 1870 to identify work ostensibly more modern and avant-garde than French impressionism. They also indicate that term 'postmodern' appeared in 1917 book by Rudolf Pannwitz to describe nihilism and collapse of European cultural values. Other pre-1960s users of 'postmodern' as break [sic]with modern include British historican Arnold Toynbee (who adopted it following appearance in D. C. Somervell's summary of Toynbee's A Study of History), cultural historian Bernard Rosenberg in his introduction to Mass Culture, economist Peter Drucker in The Landmarks of Tomorrow, and C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination.

See 'Archeology of the Postmodern' (pp. 5-16) in Best and Kellner's Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, Guilford, 1991.

So, who's right? If only I had an OED in front of me.