Written under the house pseudonym of "Victor Appleton", a stylistic idiosyncrasy of the books was that they took great trouble to avoid repetition of the unadorned word "said", instead using a different quotative verb, or modifying adverbial words or phrases in a kind of elegant variation.
At some point, this kind of humor was called a Tom Swifty, and that name is now more prevalent.
[citation needed] The Time contest caused the popularity of Tom Swifties to grow for a period of some years.
In the late '60s, comedian Stan Freberg created and narrated a series of radio commercials for the Milky Way candy bar with a character named "Tom Sweet", voiced by Walter Tetley, where Tom Swifty puns were frequent, such as, "'Ah, now for some shut-eye,' said Tom, retiringly."
In January 2017 Jack Waley-Cohen appeared on the British BBC Radio 4 program The Museum of Curiosity; his hypothetical donation to this imaginary museum was "A Book of Tom Swifties".