Who used term morphodite first notably?”
“Morphodite” is a comic pronunciation of the word hermaphrodite.. It was used most notably in the 1960 book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee when, in Chapter 8, Miss Maudie refers to the snowman Jem and Scout built. To disguise the snowman’s obvious and unfortunate resemblance to Mr. Avery, the children borrow Miss Maudie’s hat and hedge-clippers. Their attempts to feminize the caricature fall short and Miss Maudie describes their creation as “an absolute morphodite.” (Perhaps Lee also uses the word to represent race because of what the snowman is comprised of – white snow, brown dirt). It appears again, this time in Chapter 14, when Scout parrots the phrase she heard, and screams at her older brother Jem, “You damn morphodite, I’ll kill you!” Author Truman Capote used the word morphodite in The Grass Harp in 1951. It is also used, as an insult, in the one-act play “Crossing the Bar” by Don Nigro and in the Stephen King short story, “The Body” which appeared in the collection Differ
