Mortimer Thomson

Mortimer Neal Thomson (September 2, 1831 – June 25, 1875) was an American journalist and humorist who wrote under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks.

He attended Michigan University but was expelled along with several others either for his involvement in secret societies[1] or for "too much enterprise in securing subjects for the dissecting room.

Thomson is credited with coining terms including brass knuckles, gutter-snipe, good and ready, and grin and bear it.

[3] Three months later, as a correspondent for the New York Tribune he wrote a report on the Pierce Butler slave sale in Savannah, Georgia in 1859 that was subsequently published as a tract by the American Anti-slavery Society and translated into several languages.

In 1888, when his short piece, "A New Patent Medicine Operation", was anthologized in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, an introductory paragraph described Thomson as a figure whose "dashing and extravagant drolleries" had quickly passed from fashion.