In the Guardian today, Paula Cocozza writes about her effort to hunt down the origin of the phrase “peak X.” She turned to linguist Mark Liberman, who runs the Language Log 
blog, but he says it’s a hard idiom to track:
There is some good news, though. Liberman remembers the first time he noticed the phrase. It was in 2008, when the US writer John Cole blogged that “we may have hit and passed Peak Wingnut”, a derogatory term for rightwingers.
Cole’s post is nearly six years old, but can he recall what inspired the phrase? “I came up with ‘peak wingnut’ because I was shocked,” Cole says. “The Republicans seemed to get crazier and crazier. The source of it is [US blogger] Kevin Drum. At the Washington Monthly, one of the things he was always talking about was peak oil.”
This comes as news to Drum, who now writes for the web magazine Mother Jones. He was not the only person writing about peak oil, of course, but he was the one Cole read. “I’m very proud of that,” he says. “I had no idea that I had been so influential.”
So now I have three items for my future obituary: creator of Friday catblogging, popularizer of the lead-crime theory, and just possibly the kinda sorta inspiration for the Peak X meme. Not bad!
