Coover decoded

Robert Coover oversteps a bit when he writes in The Public Burning of Time magazine, personified in his novel as the national poet laureate,

Time in any case has kept his father’s counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he’s ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, … and Time‘s own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. (ch. 18, p. 326)

Not quite on the coinages. The magazine may have popularized their use, but Oxford gives several 19th-century cites for kudos, pundit, and tycoon; in the case of the first two, definitely the modern senses. The 1987 supplement does give Time a cite (from 1959) for pundit as a verb. Stronger is the case for Henry Luce (in Coover, the mother of Time) and Briton Hadden’s (the father) introduction of the current sense of tycoon as “business magnate,” adapting a 19th century word used by Westerners for a Japanese official. The sense evolved from a nickname for Abraham Lincoln:

1861 J. Hay Diary 25 Apr. in Lincoln & Civil War (1939) 12 Gen. Butler has sent an imploring request to the President to be allowed to bag the whole nest of traitorous Maryland Legislators. This the Tycoon… forbade. 1886 Outing (U.S.) IX. 164/1 The tycoon of the baggage car objected to handling the boat. 1926 Time 14 June 32/3 Married. Fred W. Fitch, 56, rich hair-tonic tycoon.