Newer Than They Think / Terms

War

• The Spanish "Reconquista" was called that for the first time in the 17th century. Perhaps not too coincidentally, the same century that saw the expulsion of the Moriscos during a wave of Patriotic Fervor.
  • The concept of the Reconquista, the idea that the Christian kingdoms of the north were heirs to the Visigothic kingdom and had a "mandate" to conquer the Muslims is both an example of this and the opposite trope. It arose at the same time as the first crusade in the 11th century. Before that, the Christian kingdoms had enough work just surviving to dream of conquering the Iberian Peninsula.
  • Even then, the idea that Muslims had to convert to Christianity or suffer expulsion didn't appear until around 1500, after the Reconquista's end. For centuries, the Christian kings were happy to have large Muslim communities in their kingdoms. These, called Mudejars, were direct vassals of the Crown unless made otherwise, and paid their taxes to it. The same happened to the Jews.
• The Crusaders and the Crusades were never called such at the time; the soldiers were fideles Sancti Petri (the faithful of Saint Peter) or milites Christi (knights of Christ). They saw themselves as undertaking an iter (journey) or peregrinatio (pilgrimage). The term "crusade" (Fr. croisade, Sp. cruzada) comes from the practice of sewing a woolen cross into one's shirt and was only used in later accounts and poems. In other words, crusades got that name because they were made by crusaders (a.k.a. people with crosses in their clothing) rather than crusaders being called that because they went on crusade.
• The Anarchy (an English civil war of 1135-54) wasn't called that until the late 19th century.
• The Wars of the Roses (an English civil war of 1455-85) get their name from an 1829 novel by Walter Scott. And although the Lancastrians had a red rose as their heraldic badge, and the Yorkists a white, the armies more commonly fought under a red dragon and a white boar, respectively. The rose symbolism was popularized by the Tudors, whose heraldic badge was a rose with both red and white petals; the imagery appeared in Queen Elizabeth's coronation pageantry and is best known today because of a scene in Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 1.
• Obviously, any war called "the X Years War" could only be called that after it was over. In some cases, it is debatable if such retroactively applied names are justified. Thus some historians see the Thirty Years War as four separate wars in quick succession (the Bohemian-Palatine War, the Danish-Lower Saxon War, the Swedish War, and the French-Swedish War) and some early modern historians see the name "the Hundred Years War" as an attempt at one-upmanship by 19th-century medieval historians, pointing to the fact that the periods of fighting were often very short and separated by longish periods of uneasy peace.
• Similarly, wars called "the First X War" or "First War of X" usually only were called that after the second one had begun.
  • Interestingly, the term "First World War" was coined in 1914 by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Although he used the term "First" to emphasize that this War is the first truly global war, not because it is the first of multiple wars.
• "Boots on the ground", the phrase that journalists and military analysts love to use to describe the deployment of combat troops, feels like some colorful centuries-old military colloquialism. In fact, it doesn't seem to have existed before 1980, with the first citation being an interview with US General Volney F. Warner about the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
• Despite not sounding out of place in The Phantom of the Opera, the phrase "point of no return" is from military aviation and dates back only to 1941. It means the point at which an aircraft has used up too much fuel to be able to return to the airfield it departed from.
• The saying "thank you for your service", directed toward US military personnel (by people other than the US President), dates to the late 1990s, and only caught on after 9/11.

Interjections

• The affirmative "OK" feels like it could be archaic English, but the earliest solid citation is a Boston newspaper from 1839. The etymology is still uncertain. The variant "A-OK" was popularized by a NASA public affairs officer during the Mercury program (but seems to have originated earlier in Air Force circles).
• The greeting "hello" is Americanism, dating to 1840. It did not become popular until the invention of the telephone. Before that, it was more commonly an expression of mild surprise (a usage which is not entirely obsolete; Alex Trebek was fond of it).
• The phrase "Boom goes the dynamite!" was invented in 2005 by Ball State University student Brian Collins during a sports newscast.
• Asking "is that a thing?" or saying that "x is a thing now" is a phenomenon of The New '10s. Before then, you might have asked "Is there such a thing as...?" or said that "x is something that exists / people do", but the now-familiar, more streamlined usage first emerged around 2010.
• Oh God, with the Verbing! falls into here. Any time you hear someone say, "Enough with the..." or "Again with the..." or "Stop with the..." they're paraphrasing Jerry Lewis's comedy routines from the 1950s, in which he was originally mimicking the semantic structures of Yiddish. (The protest "Down with...!" is older.) The exasperated "already," as in "Enough already" and "Will you hurry up already?!" is also a calque of a Yiddish structure, and of a similar vintage.
• The earliest solid citation for "yikes!" is a 1941 college newspaper piece, and it seems to have begun simultaneously with the variant "yipes!". Attempts to link "yikes" to "yoicks", an English fox-hunting call that dates to the 1600s, aren't very convincing (mainly because "yikes" is very clearly American in origin).
• "Scram", as in "get out!" could be taken for Old English, Colonial American English, or even American frontier slang, but it didn't even exist until The Roaring '20s, with a 1928 obituary for Jack Conway, a Broadway critic for Variety, ascribing its invention to him (perhaps as a shortened version of the verb form of "scramble").^note Conway also allegedly invented terms like "pushover" and "bimbo", but evidence points them being pre-existing words he picked up.

Unsorted

• The Silk Road was never called that in ancient times — the term Seidenstraße was first used in the late 19th century. The man who coined the term had a nephew who served in World War I — Manfred von Richtofen, AKA The Red Baron.
• The American Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892, did not contain any references to "the United States of America" until 1923, nor did it mention God prior to 1954, when it was added to differentiate America from the atheist Communists.
  • The writer of the original pledge was a (Christian) socialist named Francis Bellamy, and despite being a Baptist minister he wrote a version without "under God".
  • The tradition of placing one's hand over the heart while reciting the pledge came about during World War II. The original standard practice was to hold your hand over your heart only for the line "I pledge allegiance," and then to point at the flag with four fingers, arm outstretched, palm down, for the remainder of the pledge. Crop out the flag in a picture of one of your political adversaries showing his patriotism, and you've got a front-page picture that looks very much like Charles Lindbergh doing a Nazi salute (this happened).
    • The hand gesture in question is called the Roman Salute because it is assumed to have originated in the ancient Roman Republic (however, the earliest recorded use of it is from the 18th century, so this may qualify as Newer Than They Think in itself). Either way, it was around as a generic gesture of respect a long time before the Nazis — and at least a few decades before the founding of the United States, for that matter. Then, after the Nazi use of the gesture became famous, everyone else stopped using it. So that's why it's considered a "Nazi salute" today, in much the same way that the swastika is considered a "Nazi symbol" even though it has been around for thousands of years. And Now You Know.
    • Its associations with saluting may come from the fact it's used as a gesture of blessing in the Catholic Church (and the Orthodox Church, too). And they did get it from Rome (by way of Byzantium, in the second case). We know the Romans used the gesture, just not how.
• The term "Fifth Column", referring to a resistance group or spy organization that undermines something from within, only dates to 1936, in the Spanish Civil War. As Nationalist General Emilio Mola advanced with four columns of troops on the city of Madrid, he claimed a "fifth column" would rise from the city's population to aid him. He was wrong, but the term caught on and was in heavy use by the fall of France in 1940. Interestingly, after Mola coined it, the term is always used to refer to an enemy cabal and not a group on the side of the speaker.
• "Flying saucer" wasn't coined as a term until 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted a formation of UFOs and coined the term in an interview. Interestingly, the term was used to describe the objects' movement — "[like a] saucer skipping over water" — rather than shape (he described the shape as crescent-like). That's right, the image of the circular flying saucer is really a result of Memetic Mutation. ^note Incidentally, the United States experimented with real aircraft with this shape during World War II, but they called them "Flying Flapjacks"
  • Ironically, "UFO" has come to mean "flying saucer", but in its original USAF coinage means precisely what it says — an airborne phenomenon, a material object and hence apparently flying, which for the moment at least cannot be identified. Thus, the report of a UFO by one of the Apollo 8 astronauts wasn't as exciting or significant as commonly supposed.
• The term "Ivy League" wasn't used until the 1930s; its origin is uncertain. It initially described the division of college athletics that eight coincidentally highly exclusive colleges found themselves in. Only much later did it become a blanket term for those schools as a collective. ^note  These schools began calling themselves the "Ivy Group" in 1945, when they signed an agreement governing football competition. The formal establishment of the athletic Ivy League came in 1954, when the Ivy Group Agreement was extended to cover all sports.
• The illusionist's meaning of "prestige" did not exist before the 1995 novel The Prestige. Even in the novel, the first two parts were referred to as "set up" and "performance"; the more ostentatious "pledge" and "turn" were coined by Nolan for the film.
• The NATO phonetic alphabet (the one that begins "alpha, bravo") was standardized in 1956. Thus, any depicted use in World War II settings is a case of research failure. The Other Wiki has comparative tables of the various national systems is use before 1956.
• Both the notion that women and children should be saved first and that The Captain must sink with his ship unless everybody else is safe stem from (quite horrible) naval incidents in the 19th century. And only the second one did ever have some actual backup in maritime law, while the first one was more of a social convention.
• While Russia's rulers have been sending people for exile or punishment in Siberia for centuries, the term gulag began as the acronymized name of the office that organised Stalin's labour camps (Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Ispravityel'no-Trudovih Lagyeryey i koloniy = The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies). This was established in 1930.
  • The term itself became popular after Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in 1973. Russians themselves never used that term in common talk, referring to labor camps as lagyer (lit. 'camp') and katorga (literally "forced labor").
• Pyrokinesis is a term invented by Stephen King in Firestarter. The concept itself is incredibly old, however. Ironically, since the proper terms for various psychokinetic powers don't always appear in dictionaries, some people think they've invented the term, also making it Older Than They Think.
• Acronyms (innovative words formed from the initials of a phrase, such as radar or laser) in English are no older than World War I — certainly, there has never been any confirmed instance of an acronym older than this. This is not helped by the fact that "acronym" is often abused as a synonym of "initialism", or that some so-called "acronyms" (such as the Greek for "fish" being composed of the initials of the Greek for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour") are actually acrostics (the phrase was devised so that its initials formed an already-existing word). Indeed, "radar" is a double case — originally a WW2 acronym for "RAdio Detection And Ranging" (deliberately palindromic to reflect how radar works), it has since become an acrostic for "Royal Association for DisAbility Rights" (who, amongst other things, operate Britain's National Key Scheme for public toilets). Various folk etymologies, especially for swear words like For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and Ship High in Transit, are 100% wrong but still amusing. The first recorded use of the word "acronym" itself was in 1943.
  • Again, we must emphasize, that's just English. In other languages, older acronyms do exist; they are particularly common among the Semitic languages, as any combination of three consonants can be read as a word (most Semitic languages are written with alphabets that are actually "abjads", that is, they do not expressly write out short vowels or any vowels, depending on the alphabet). The Talmud contains plenty of examples; even the Hebrew term for the Bible, Tanakh, is an acronym (Torah, Nevi'im,^note i.e. the Prophets and Ketuvim,^note The Writings standing for the three sections of the Bible; when you write the word "TNK" in Hebrew, Tanakh is how you'd pronounce it).
• The term "Home Counties" to describe the English counties around London (Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Sussex) wasn't used until the late 19th century. It derives from the Home Circuit of the itinerant Assize Court.
• You have definitely seen this one circulating around the web:
  The Earth is degenerating these days.
  Bribery and corruption abound.
  Children no longer mind their parents,
  every man wants to write a book,
  and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.
  • Then comes the line that this saying is from an Assyrian tablet dated 2,800 BC. Guess what? Assyria hadn't even existed at that time! The earliest mention of this saying is from 1924 book by an American priest (proof link). And most probably he just made the whole thing up.
  • The complaints that these sayings mention, on the other hand, go back at least to the Romans.
• The term "Byzantine Empire" was actually popularized in the nineteenth century and was only first used in 1557, a full century after Constantinople had been conquered by the Ottomans. In its time it was known as the "Empire of the Greeks" to outsiders and went under a few names to its inhabitants (including "Roman Empire", "Empire of the Romans", and "Romania").
  • In turn, the term "Ottoman Empire" only came into vogue after it crumbled during the 20th century, using the Byzantines' convention as a precedent. During its lifetime, it was known as the "Turkish Empire", "Turkish Sultanate", or simply as "Turkey", or "the Caliphate" (since it controlled the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, having plucked them from the Mamluks).
  • Likewise, the word "Aztec" was popularized by Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century to differentiate between pre-Spanish conquest "Mexicans" and the inhabitants of the then newly independent country. Today, some people prefer the use of the native name Mexica (from where Mexican is derived) instead. In fact, the Aztec foundation myth could be summed as the god Huitzilopochtli showing up at Tenochtitlan and telling them "This is your new home! You will not be Aztecs (i.e. from Aztlan) ever again!"
• The e-mail hoax Life in the 1500s claims many common expressions date to the sixteenth century, including "raining cats and dogs", "dirt poor", "bring home the bacon", "chew the fat", "trench mouth", "graveyard shift", and "dead ringer." These expressions originated more recently, with "raining cats and dogs" dating to 1708, "dirt poor" to 1937, "bring home the bacon" to 1909, "chew the fat" to 1885, "trench mouth" to sometime in World War One, "graveyard shift" to 1907, and "dead ringer" to 1891.
  • Snopes has a thorough debunking.
• The practice of referring to the lost skyscrapers of the World Trade Center as the "North Tower" and "South Tower" only became commonplace in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. While they stood, the Twin Towers were known as Tower 1 and Tower 2.
• Here's a Newer-Than-They-Think Catchphrase. A common Memetic Mutation regarding Statler and Waldorf is their trademark laugh, rendered as "dohohohohohoh". If you watch footage of Statler and Waldorf under their original performers, the laugh was a quite different "heheheheheh". The laugh we're familiar with first surfaced in The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992 when Jerry Nelson and Dave Goelz took over the roles after the deaths of Jim Henson and Richard Hunt.
• The concept of "genocide" dates to ancient times, but the actual word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
  • The word "Holocaust" was used as a stock term for a few tragedies during the 20th century, including both world wars and the Armenian genocide of the 1920s. It wasn't until the 1960s, in the aftermath of the widely publicized trial of Adolf Eichmann, that it began to be applied exclusively to the Nazi persecution of Jews — and some argue that it didn't actually catch on among the public until the release of the Meryl Streep-starred Holocaust miniseries in 1978.
  • The related term "ethnic cleansing" dates only to 1991, being first widely applied during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
• The term Steampunk was coined by K. W. Jeter in 1987. The term "cyberpunk" barely precedes it and was first attested in 1986.
• Although the term "political correctness" dates back at least to the 1970s, it didn't gain wide currency until the late 1980s and was completely unknown in the UK until well into the 1990s. Anybody in the UK who says they used the term or were accused of it, in the 1980s, can safely be assumed to be just plain wrong; more likely the term actually used by, or against, them was "right on".
• The abbreviation "USA" for The United States was virtually unheard of before the 1920s; before then, "the Union" was the usual shorthand, although "US"/"U.S." was known. Also, "U.S.A." was known...to mean (most commonly) "United States Army" or (more rarely) "United States Attorney."
• The first monarch to be addressed as "Your Majesty" was Charles V in the early 16th century, who thought that as Holy Roman Emperor he deserved something that ranked above "Royal Highness" (Majesty comes from Latin Maiestas, which means "Greatness"). Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England immediately screwed with him by adopting the treatment themselves — albeit inconsistently in Henry's case, as he continued to be addressed as "Highness" and "Grace" in addition to "Majesty" throughout his reign.
  • The "Majesty" style does seem to have been used (in the alternative to the standard "Lord" or "Grace") by Richard II and Henry V of England a little earlier, but it certainly didn't become the standard until the modern period. In many countries, it's never been adopted.
• Similarly, the idea of every son and daughter of the reigning British monarch (and we do mean British, as it didn't happen until after the 1707 Act of Union) automatically holding the title of "prince" and "princess" was introduced by George I in the early eighteenth century, bringing it along with him from the Holy Roman Empire, where he was the Elector of Hanover (and where the title of "prince" was used far more liberally). Prior to this, the sovereign created the title, and only for the eldest son (Prince of Wales) until Charles I created the title of "Princess Royal" for his eldest daughter, taking direct inspiration from the French court. Younger sons and daughters of monarchs (who tended to be rare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at any rate) were usually styled "Lord" and "Lady" until they were either granted Dukedoms (in the case of sons) or married (in the case of daughters).
• The name "Maria" was pronounced the same as "Mariah" in English until the mid-20th century when the influence of Mexican and Italian immigrants to the US gradually changed it. (See for example the song "They Call The Wind Maria," where it rhymes with "fire.") Additionally, Don Quixote was frequently pronounced as "Don Quicksut" and Don Juan as "Don Joo-an" until the 1950s or so. (In Byron's Don Juan, the rhyme scheme and metre make it clear that's how it should be pronounced, rhyming it with "new one" and the like. That's how English teachers will pronounce it, but these days they must explain why.)
  • Similarly, "Lisa" was pronounced "Leeza" when it was first imported to America, fitting its origin as a Continental European diminutive of Elizabeth. That's how Grace Kelly's character in Rear Window pronounced her name. By The '60s the more familiar pronunciation had won out, though.
• The word "mullet", in reference to the long men's hairstyle, was coined in the 1994 Beastie Boys song "Mullet Head", well after the style had faded out of popularity. ^note  The mullet fish has no neck, and a fish rots from the neck down, so that may be where the slang derives from, especially since most human Mullet Heads achieve this same effect via excessive hair and musculature. ("Mulling Over the Mullet", in Grand Royal magazine, according to The Other Wiki.)
• The word "meh", meaning "unimpressive, banal, mediocre", was unknown in writing before 2003. In its spoken form, it dates to the mid-1990s, deriving from The Simpsons. On the other hand, its Spanish equivalent, "pse" (usually spoken as "Psee..."), is old.
• The phrase "In God We Trust" first appeared on U.S. paper currency in 1957. It was mandatorily included on all US coins two years before this.
• While the device was used before, the term "Molotov Cocktail" was coined by the Finns as a joke during the Winter War (1939-1940). Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov had claimed in a radio broadcast that the Soviet air force was not dropping bombs on Finland, only "food packages" for the "starving" Finns. The Finns told Molotov that he could eat his packages and drink that cocktail to go with the food.
• The superlative "The mother of all...", referring to the greatest example of a particular thing, derives from Arabic; specifically, its use in English comes from Saddam Hussein's declaration in 1990 that the Gulf War would be the "mother of all battles". (In Arabic, of course, the locution is ancient.)
• Since a good portion of the public still primarily knows George Takei for his career-defining role as Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, many people are surprised to learn that his famous Catchphrase, "Oh myyy...", isn't actually from Star Trek. He first said it during a broadcast of The Howard Stern Show that aired over a decade after his final appearance as Sulu.
• The word "camouflage" was coined by the British Army in 1917, modified from the French slang word camoufler.
• The term "Black Friday", referring to shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, cannot be proven to have existed before 1961. The term remained unknown outside the Philadelphia area until the late 1980s, and Black Friday itself has only been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005 (the former busiest days being December 23 and the days preceding it).
• The first attested use of the word "fundamentalism" was in 1920. Specifically, it derived from The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, a very influential set of essays defending conservative Protestantism and attacking various stripes of liberal theology, Catholicism, and secularism, published between 1910 and 1915. Not all writers of historical fiction know this.
• The term "high five" first appeared in print in 1980 and the gesture itself cannot be proven to have existed before the 1970s, though its predecessor, the "low five", is recorded in African American communities at least as far back as WW2.
• The first knock-knock joke recorded in print dates to 1929, and they didn't become widely known until the 1950s.
• The word "snark", in the sense of "cynical yet delightfully witty" that this site uses (such as on Deadpan Snarker), dates to 2002.
• The word "orange" was not used in English before the 16th century. The word itself derives from the color of the fruit, which was unknown in Europe before the early modern period. Medieval writers sometimes used "saffron" to describe things we would now call orange, and there was a word in Old English geoluhread (yellow-red), but more often just called orange things "red"—hence why the terms "red hair" and "robin redbreast" still exist in English, despite their being more orange than red. Comparisons can be made here to East Asia's traditional lack of distinction between blue and green.
  • Likewise, pink has only been considered a separate color from red since the mid-18th century; the first known use of the word "pink" to refer to the color dates to 1733, deriving from the flower of the same name.
• The sayings "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "Above all else to thine own self be true" are often misattributed to Jesus. Both actually originate from Polonius in Hamlet.
• The standard pirate accent dates back to the 1950 movie Treasure Island when Robert Newton used his natural Cornish accent to play Long John Silver. The association of English rural accents with seafaring arguably goes back to Lord Nelson, whose contemporaries noted his heavy Norfolk accent, and Cornwall has been known for producing large quantities of pirates since the Middle Ages, but Treasure Island brought the accent into pop culture, as well as popularising the phrase "ARRRRHHHH!". For reference, "Ar" was the southern English equivalent of the Northern "Aye" until universal education started.
• The word "sexism" was coined by Pauline M. Leet at a conference talk in 1965 as an analogy to "racism", and first appeared in print in 1968 in Carolyn Bird's article "On Being Born Female", from which it gained wider currency.
• The word "wank", despite sounding like it belongs with other much older four-letter words, was first attested in 1948 as a noun and in 1950 as a verb — its various metaphorical meanings are more recent still.
• The phrase "big hair", used to describe the stereotypical 1980s hairstyle, was not recorded until 1989 — after the trend had begun to wane. Prior to that, there had existed only approximate equivalents — pompadour being the most famous example, and perhaps the oddest example being a word in a native New Guinean language for thick, woolly hair: "big head."
• The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for "dicey" is A Town Like Alice, published in 1950.
• "Corinthian leather" (usually "rich Corinthian leather"), which has the aura of luxury and old wealth, was a term invented for a car commercial by an ad agency in 1974. The term is meaningless and has nothing to do with Corinth.
• "Bucket list" was coined for the 2007 film of that title. Within a year of the movie coming out, most people would have sworn the phrase had been around forever.
• The term "Friends with Benefits" was coined by Alanis Morissette in her 1995 song "Head Over Feet".
• The word "doodle", defined as a mindless sketch, was coined for the 1936 film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.
• In the US, "Vinyl" was not commonly used to refer to gramophone records until their revival in the 2000s. Before then, the standard term was simply "records" or "LPs" or perhaps "45s".
  • Records weren't even made of vinyl before The '50s; until then, they were made of shellac.
• The term "net neutrality" was coined in 2003 by Columbia law professor Tim Wu.
• The term "pearl-clutching", meaning puritanical or prudish, does not appear in print before 1987; its use was popularized in a series of skits on In Living Color! in the early 1990s.
• The earliest known metaphorical use of the term "dumpster fire" in print is from a 2003 Arizona Republic review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003).
• The term "cheerleader effect", referring to a phenomenon by which women look more attractive in groups than individually, was coined in a 2008 episode of How I Met Your Mother.
• The use of the word "type" to mean "a kind of a particular thing" was first attested in 1843; before then, it referred strictly to movable type (i.e., letters used in a printing press.)
• The term "downtown" was first recorded in the 1830s, being coined in New York City, where it referred to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan (making the "down" literal, whereas in most other cities where the term is used "downtown" can be in the north, west, or east of the city). It is for this reason that most Old World cities do not have a "downtown", as their central business districts were already centuries old (if not older) and known by other names.
• The term "penny farthing" for a bicycle with one directly driven large wheel and one small, only came into use in the 1890s to mock the old-fashioned vehicles which had by then been superseded by the chain-driven bicycle we recognize today. In their heyday, they were known as simply bicycles (there is no other practical two-wheeled self-propelled vehicle), and hobbyists prefer to use the proper retronym "ordinary" to refer to them (as opposed to modern "safety" bicycles).
• Although serial killers have existed for centuries, the term "serial killer" itself was first attested in 1981 to describe John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. The use of "serial" to describe murders is slightly older, dating to the 1960s.
• In the United States the word "data" wasn't commonly pronounced with a long 'a' until Patrick Stewart did so on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987.
• Daffy Duck invented the pronunciation of despicable with a silent "E" in 1951.
• The term "hot take", meaning a provocative opinion or perspective, only seems to have gone into common usage in 2014, imported from sports radio and sports blogs, where deliberately contrarian opinions are popular attention-getting devices. A 1993 use of the term by political strategist James Carville in Rolling Stone was more in the sense of "popular, trendy opinion".
• The phrase "sweet summer child" sounds like a quaint, centuries-old term for a naive person. Maybe it's a proverb from the bible or Shakespeare or something? Or could it be a Southern expression akin to "oh, bless your heart"? Nope. In reality, it was coined by George R. R. Martin for A Game of Thrones (1996).
• The use of the word "toilet" to mean "a latrine" (i.e., a device you pee and poop into) is an Americanism, first attested in 1895. Before then, the word "toilet" referred to a lady's dressing table, then gradually evolved to refer to the whole dressing room, and then to a dressing room with a latrine room attached, and then to the latrine room specifically, and then, finally, to the latrine itself.
• "Meritocracy", the word describing the idea that social mobility should be based solely on skills, sounds like something that originated in the Age of Enlightenment, but it was actually coined in 1955 by a group of British sociologists (Jean Floud, Alan Fox, Michael Young; all three worked closely together and used the term in academic writings at the time, but it's not clear which one actually invented it), with Young's 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy popularizing it (even though Young portrayed the concept very negatively, arguing that it created social inequality).
• The word "environment", in the ecological sense of "the natural world" (as opposed to i.e. cities and industry), was first recorded in 1956; its variants are more recent still, with "environmentalist" dating to 1970 and "environmentalism" to 1972.
  • The word "rainforest" was unknown in English until the 1970s, before which they were called jungles. This transition is, again, thanks to the environmentalist movement.
• The word "blah", referring to meaningless or boring speech (as in "blah blah blah"), was first recorded in 1918.
• The term "radio" began as military jargon and didn't become the standard term in the US until after World War II, before which radios were called "wirelesses".
• The term "lede"—meaning the first sentence of a news story (as in the saying "bury the lede")—dates to the 1970s at the earliest, and didn't catch on until the 1990s, probably popularized by New York Times writer William Saffire's "On Language" column. It is a deliberate alteration of "lead" meant to differentiate it from its homograph "lead" (as in, the metal that typewriters are made of). Ironically, the widespread use of "lede" didn't emerge until typewriter-based newsrooms were just about extinct, making it an invented tradition. Merriam-Webster didn't even list the word "lede" until 2008.
• The earliest known use of the phrase "go ham" to mean "go hard as a motherfucker" dates to 2006, apparently emerging in the hip-hop community. It was popularized in 2011 by Kanye West and Jay-Z's song "H.A.M."
• The term "24/7" (meaning "24 hours a day, 7 days a week") is first attested in a 1983 Sports Illustrated article, in which Lousiana State University basketball player Jerry Reynolds used it to describe his jump shot.
• The term "sexually transmitted disease" (STD) did not gain wide currency until the 1990s—the World Health Organization first adopted it in 1994. Before then, "venereal disease" (VD) was the dominant term. The reason for the change is that, historically, only two diseases were thought to be transmitted sexually: gonorrhea and syphilis. By the 1970s, other diseases such as genital herpes and hepatitis were better understood, and the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, especially, accelerated the shift in terminology.
• The word "menu" was first recorded in English in 1837.
  • Similarly, the word "restaurant" dates to 1821 in English, and even in French, its use dates only to 1765. In fact, the whole concept of a restaurant—i.e., a place dedicated to sitting and ordering food from a menu—is an invention of the 18th century. Before then, travelers were either fed at inns or bought street food.
• The term "sexual harassment" was coined in 1975 by American lesbian activist Lin Farley and didn't become prominent until Anita Hill's case against then-Supreme-Court-nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.
• The term "unibrow" (i.e. eyebrows joined together by a bridge of hair in the middle) was first attested in 1988.
• The earliest-known use of the term "five-second rule", referring to the folk belief that picking up a dropped piece of food within [x] number of seconds means it won't have germs on it, dates to the 1995 novel Wanted: Rowing Coach, and even there it was a twenty-second rule.
• The word "suicide" was first attested in the 1650s and is of English origin. Also, suicide was illegal everywhere in Europe until the 19th century.
• Japan's period of isolationism wasn't called sakoku ("closed country") until 1801, more than 150 years after it began. Furthermore, the term didn't come into widespread usage until after the Meiji Restoration, at which point it was over. It was certainly never used by the Tokugawa shogunate to describe its own policy, which it instead termed kaikin ("maritime restrictions"). Many modern historians dislike the term Sakoku, feeling that it overstates the extent to which Japan was isolated.
• "Grouch" seems for all the world like it's over a thousand years old, an Old English term, even a loan word from Old Norse. Nope, it only appears to date from around 1895. To put it another way, when Oscar the Grouch debuted on Sesame Street in 1969, the word "grouch" had only been in the English language for 74 years, i.e., the same age as then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It seems to have evolved from a much older word, "grutch", which was a synonym for "gripe" or "complain".
• The word "gimp", referring to a crippled limb, dates only to 1925.
• The word "codswallop" sounds old-timey, but the first known instance of it in writing dates to 1959.
• The phrase "over the top" in the sense of "beyond the limits" or "too far" is first attested in 1968. It derives from trench warfare in World War I, where to go "over the top" was to launch an attack (which, due to the tactics of trench warfare, often met with disaster).
• The earliest known use of the term "go pear-shaped" meaning "to fail" dates to 1983 and is thought to have originated in the Royal Air Force as a euphemized version of "tits up".
• The exclamation "oops" first appears in print in 1933, and "whoops" only slightly earlier, in 1925.
• The term "Poe's law", referring to the difficulty of telling the real views of crackpots from satires of their views, was coined in 2005 by Nathan Poe during a discussion on evolution in a Christian forum, with the original formulation of the law specifically referencing the views of creationists.
• While the Washington Post has been around since 1877, it only adopted its famous slogan "Democracy dies in darkness" in 2017, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump. For its first 140 years, the Post had no slogan.
  • Similarly, although the Post has an exceedingly long history, it was an obscure local paper until its reporters broke the Watergate Scandal in The '70s. Until then, the major newspaper in Washington was the Star, which began publishing in 1852 but ceased publication in 1981, when the Post acquired all its assets and archives.
• "Gaslight"/"gaslighting", a verb describing a form of psychological abuse in which the victim is manipulated into a distorted perception of reality, often by suggesting that they've misremembered something or that certain events didn't actually happen (even though they did), refers to the 1938 play/1944 film Gaslight, but has only become a commonplace term in the last couple of decades. There are citations for "gaslighting" dating back to The '50s, and it became an informal term used by psychologists (often in relation to Domestic Abuse), with occasional references in pop culture, over the decades, but it gained currency in modern American political discourse via a 1995 New York Times column by Maureen Dowd, using it in reference to Bill Clinton's provocations of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Its popularity was kickstarted during the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, when it rapidly caught on in the mainstream press and was applied to a wide variety of different topics.
• The notion that prostitution is the "world's oldest profession" is first recorded in Rudyard Kipling's 1889 short story "On the City Wall". Before then, the phrase was associated with various other professions, such as farming and tailoring.
• The term "ebonics" was coined by American professor R.L. Williams for his 1975 book of the same name.
• The earliest known use of the word "tails" to mean the reverse side of a coin (as in the phrase "heads or tails") appears in the 1684 play "The Atheist" by Thomas Otway. Before then, the English terms for the two sides of a coin were "cross" and "pile".
• Bushido — the supposed "way of the warrior", or code of the samurai — was an uncommon term until the 1899 publication of Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, who codified almost everything associated with it, including presenting it as the Japanese counterpart to European chivalry. Nitobe, who lived in the United States and admired the empires of the West, authored the book in English for a Western audience, with whom it was an immediate hit. Only later was it translated into Japanese, and neither the book nor the word bushido caught on in Japan until the 1930s, when they suited ultranationalist government propaganda.
• The first usage of the word "buff" to mean "muscular" dates to the 1980s. The derivative uses of buff used on this wiki, such as Status Buff, etc., are even newer.
• The term "ASMR" (autonomous sensory meridian response) has no basis in the scientific literature; it was coined in a 2010 forum discussion at steadyhealth.com by user Jennifer Allen. The word "meridian" in this context was intended as a polite euphemism for "orgasm" (as in "peak" or "climax"), given that the sensation is often described as a "brain orgasm".
• The earliest known use of the term "outsourcing" in print dates to 1981.
  • Similarly, "downsize" dates only to 1986.
• The expression "No way!" was first attested in 1968.
• The word "massage" was first recorded in English in 1874.
• "Scalawag" is archaic, but not as much as it sounds: It first appears to have been used as an insult toward humans after the American Civil War, by white Southerners who opposed Reconstruction policies toward those who supported it. That didn't stop it from showing up, for example, in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
• The term "perfect storm", referring to a set of circumstances converging to cause disaster, was coined by writer Sebastian Junger in 1993 in reference to the 1991 Halloween Nor'easter season. He then authored a book called The Perfect Storm, published in 1997, and adapted into the 2000 film of the same name, from which the term entered popular use.
• The word "skank", referring to an unattractive or promiscuous woman, was first attested in 1965.
• "Poster child" dates to The Great Depression, but at that point, it literally referred to the practice of using afflicted children in promotional campaigns for charities like the March of Dimes and Easter Seals. The broader metaphorical sense used to mean "a representative of an idea or cause" is much younger, first attested c. 1990.
• The word "cougar", in reference to a woman who dates younger men, first appeared in 1999, on a now-defunct Canadian dating website called cougarsdate.com.
• "Props" in the sense of "respect" or "congratulations" dates to the 1990s.
• The phrase "tall, dark and handsome" arose in the 1920s in reference to silent film heart-throb Rudolph Valentino.
• The term "intellectual", as a noun referring to educated people, was first used during the Dreyfus affair in France in the 1890s.
• The earliest known use of the word "plague" to refer to The Black Death dates to c. 1600, about 250 years after it happened (1347-1353). Contemporaneous writers referred to it as "pestis" or "pestilentia" (pestilence). The term "Black Death" itself has only been used in English since about 1750, though Danish and Swedish writers had used that name since the late 15th century.
• The word "bore" meaning "a dull or uninteresting thing" dates to 1778, with its derivative form "boredom" dating to 1840 and "boring" to 1853.
• The term "global warming" was coined in the 1980s, and both the term and the issue of global warming itself only entered mainstream awareness in 1988 following climate scientist James Hansen's testimony to the US Senate.
• The term Speculative Fiction, as an umbrella term encompassing science fiction and fantasy, did not emerge until the 2000s. While Robert A. Heinlein did coin the term in 1947, he used it as a synonym for sci-fi, explicitly excluding fantasy; writers in the 1960s and 1970s likewise adopted it specifically to mean hard science fiction, i.e., sci-fi that could happen.
• The word "screenshot" was first attested in 1991. In fact, the use of the word "shot" to refer to a photograph, or camera angle dates only to 1958.
• The word "teleport" dates to 1940 and was originally used in religious contexts only; its science fiction meaning, i.e., instant transportation, dates only to 1951.
• To "have issues", in the sense of having personal problems (e.g., "that guy has issues"), is first attested in 1990.
• Currently, the monarch of Ancient Egypt is only known to have been called "pharaoh" (which means "great house," i.e. court or palace) from the middle of the New Kingdom onward. This period excludes everything from the country's unification to the building of the great pyramids, the Hyksos' invasion, and even some of the famous earlier New Kingdom monarchs like Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun (which also makes it Briefer Than They Think—by more than half of the so-called Pharaonic period). Granted, the usage is still older than most countries that still exist today—but looking at it another way, Egypt was already an ancient country when it started. Prior to then, Egyptian monarchs had several different titles that were used in different situations (not unlike modern monarchs, in fact) but Egyptologists generally translate most of them as simply "king".
• The word "pheromone" was coined in 1959.
• The Fan Nickname "Bright Knight" to refer to the idiosyncratic portrayal of Batman on his 1960s live-action series only dates to The New '10s. It was not widely used as a nickname for Adam West, the star of that series until it was featured in obituaries and other reminisces upon his death in 2017.
• Much like Las Vegas itself (which didn't become the tourist mecca we know it was today until after World War II), the expression "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" is surprisingly recent, with no attestations before 2003. However, it's a Snow Clone of an older expression, "What happens on tour, stays on tour".
• These days, it is common to refer to a screen resolution in any context by taking the vertical number of pixels and tacking the letter "p" onto the end, with the idea that it means "pixels". However, prior to the 2010s, this was only used to refer to TV standards, where "p" stood for progressive as opposed to "i" meaning "interlaced" - with only one number being used, as TV broadcast resolution was dependent on the vertical number of lines. In computer contexts, a resolution was always referred to fully, e.g., "1024x768" ("x" standing for "by"), "1920x1200", and so on, and nobody would call them "768p" or "1200p".
• The first attestation of the word "hoser" dates to 1980, having been coined as an Unusual Euphemism for the Bob & Doug McKenzie sketches on SCTV. The folk etymologies connecting it to the old days of hockey are certainly false.
• The word karate famously means "empty hand", but this has only been the case since 1924 when the Keio University karate club changed the spelling of karate from 唐手 (Chinese hand) to 空手 (empty hand) for nationalistic reasons.
• The appellation "The City That Never Sleeps" was coined in 1977 for the theme song of New York, New York, performed by Frank Sinatra. It was applied to other cities even later still.
• The word "sibling" to mean "brother or sister" was coined in 1903. It was a revival of a long-disused Old English word that referred to any relative or family member.
• Although hooded sweatshirts have existed since the 1930s, the first attestation of the word "hoodie" dates to 1990.
• "If it ain't broke, don't (try to) fix it" sounds like nineteenth-century or even older, but there's no record of it before 1976.
• The word "medieval" first appeared in 1825, a neologism derived from the Latin phrase medium aevum. The older word for medieval things was "Gothic".
• Diana, Princess of Wales, was never referred to in her lifetime as "the People's Princess"; this sobriquet was coined for her by Prime Minister Tony Blair in his remarks on her passing.
• The word "scumbag" emerged c. 1939 and originally meant "condom"; the metaphorical use, referring to an unpleasant person, dates only to 1971.
• The term "hot button" has only been around since the 1970s, and it was originally marketing-speak, referring to the need or desire of a consumer that would be satiated by a product. The earliest application of the term to political issues dates to 1981.
• The word "career" in the sense of "the course of one's professional life" was first attested in 1803.
• The saying "You break it, you buy it" was first used in a Miami Beach gift shop in 1952, and even then, it was in slightly longer form as "If you break it, you've bought it".
• The use of the word "franchise" to mean "authorization to sell a company's goods/services" dates to 1959, and its application to media licensing/merchandise/etc., as used on TV Tropes, dates only to the 1980s. Prior to then, "(the) franchise" generally referred to (and was used interchangeably with) "suffrage", or the eligibility to vote, as in Isaac Asimov's 1955 short story by that name, although it had other meanings.
• The term "gender role" was coined in 1955 by psychologist John Money, who used it to describe the way intersex people would choose behaviors conventionally associated with men or women. The term "gender identity" was coined by researcher Robert Stoller in 1968. "Transgender" is first attested in 1974. "Trans woman" was coined in 1996 by Leslie Feinberg for her book Transgender Warriors.
  • The term "two-spirit", referring to third-gender people in traditional Native American cultures, was invented in 1990 at a gay and lesbian First Nations conference in Canada, to replace the established anthropological term "berdache", which was deemed offensive (it derived from a French slur for gays that itself came from a Persian word for "slave" or "captive").
• The earliest known use of the term "chain-mail" dates to Francis Grose's A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons (1786). The term was popularized in 1822 by Walter Scott's novel The Fountains of Nigel. Before then, chainmail was known as simply "mail", deriving from the French maille, meaning "chain".
• The use of the word "mess" to mean "a jumble" or "a confused state" dates only to 1828, before which "mess" meant a communal eating area.
• The earliest citation for the saying "shut your pie-hole" dates to Stephen King's 1983 novel Christine.
• The word "infrastructure" dates to 1875 in French and 1887 in English, and originally referred specifically to the substrate that had to be laid down before railroad tracks could be laid along a particular route. The word was not used in its urban-planning sense until the 1970s.
• The word "prat" as British slang for a contemptible person was first attested in 1968.
• "Glitzy" is a recent loanword from Yiddish, dating only to 1966. "Glitz" is even more recent, being first attested in 1977.
• The earliest known use of the word "kerfuffle" dates to 1970.
• The word "shack" was first attested in 1878, an Americanism originally referring to a wooden hut. The word was first applied to houses in 1910.
• The word "myth" first appears in 1818, from the Greek mythos (story), being invented by 19th-century writers to differentiate Greek religion, which they viewed as obviously untrue, from Christianity and modern science, which they viewed as true. The first known use of "myth" to refer to any false story or claim dates to 1840.
• The earliest known use of the acronym "NIMBY" (not in my backyard) dates to 1980.
• The term "snowflake", in the sense of a coddled person, was coined by Chuck Palahniuk for his 1996 novel Fight Club.
• The term "the Establishment", in the sense of "the powers that be", was coined by historian A.J.P. Taylor in a 1953 book review.
• "Lazy Susan" as a term for a rotating tray doesn't have an unambiguous printed citation until 1903. The device itself dates to the 1700s but was used in England and called a "dumbwaiter" until the latter 1800s when it started becoming common in America. "Dumbwaiter" ended up being used in American English for a small freight elevator, but no one's been able to pinpoint exactly where "lazy Susan" originated, with a bunch of unconvincing "Just So" Stories revolving around young girls or women named Susan or claims that "Susan" was some sort of old slang term for a tray.
• The use of the word "demographic" as a noun, dates only to 1998.
• The phrase "inside the Beltway" was first used as a metonym for the US government in 1975. Prior to this term catching on, the phrase "on the Hill" was used instead, "the Hill" referring to Capitol Hill. The Capital Beltway Road surrounding Washington DC, to which the term refers, has existed only since 1961.
• The word "romance" in the sense of "love affair" dates only to 1912. The sense derives from "romance" meaning a poem about heroic adventuring, which then became associated with heightened emotions and passion, and then specifically with love.
• The term "spin", in the sense of "propaganda", was born during the 1984 US presidential election season, deriving from the "spin rooms" that would try to manipulate public reporters' opinions in favor of their candidate. It first received mainstream exposure in the aftermath of the first debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, in which Reagan's "spin doctors" (another term coined during the campaign) were able to turn a loss into a win with careful application of social psychology.
• The words "feudalism" and its variants were not used in the Middle Ages. The phrase "feudal system" appeared in 1736, in Baronia Anglica, published nine years after the death of its author Thomas Madox, in 1727. In 1771, in his History of Manchester, John Whitaker first introduced the word "feudalism" and the notion of the feudal pyramid. Economist Adam Smith popularized the idea of a "feudal system" and "feudal government" in his book The Wealth of Nations (1776).
• The word "donkey" is first attested in 1785, being a polite substitute for "ass", which had become by then a homophone for "arse".
• The word "nimrod", in the sense of a stupid or uncool person, dates to 1983, arising in teenager slang and derived from Bugs Bunny calling Elmer Fudd such. The name "Nimrod" was originally a reference to a mighty hunter in the Bible; Bugs's use of the name for Fudd was meant to be ironic. However, "nimrod" sounds like general-purpose insults like "dimwit" or "numbskull", so it was not obvious to kids watching Looney Tunes reruns on TV that "nimrod" was a reference to anything.
• The verb "groom" in the sense of "tending/caring" dates to 1809, and the sense of "tidying up" to 1847. Both are derived from the older noun "groom" meaning someone who cares for horses. The sense of "groom" to mean "to mentor someone for a future endeavor" was first attested in 1887, and the commonly heard related sense of "befriend someone, typically much younger in age, with the ultimate goal of a sexual relationship with them" only dates to 1985.
• The term "Asperger syndrome" was coined in 1976 and was not widely used until after Uta Frith's English translation of Hans Asperger's work was published in 1991. Asperger never used it himself; he used the term "autistic psychopathy" up to his death in 1980.
• The expression "pie in the sky" was coined by socialist Joe Hill in his 1911 song "The Preacher and the Slave", a parody of the Salvation Army that lambasted the charity for focusing on the poor's spiritual, rather than material, needs.
• The expression "go ballistic" in the sense of "become angry" dates to 1981, deriving from the association of ballistic missiles with nuclear explosions. The word "ballistic" itself just means to follow a smooth arcing trajectory, like a ball thrown into the air.
• The slang pejorative "ho" in the sense of "whore" dates from the earliest to the end of The '70s. The first high profile use of it in American pop culture was a 1981 Saturday Night Live sketch where Eddie Murphy played entrepreneurial pimp Velvet Jones, who did a commercial touting his self-help book I Wanna Be a Ho.
• The term "story arc" — and, by extension, all derivative uses of the word "arc" — was coined in 1988 for the TV series Wiseguy.
• "Master bedroom" as a term for the main bedroom in a house was invented by Sears for their 1926 catalog, for use in their line of house plans (back then they sold house plans for people who wanted to build a home from scratch).
• The term "shrinkflation", denoting consumer products shrinking while their prices remain the same, was first used in 2009; it was originally a play on "stagflation", which dates to the 1970s.
• The earliest-known use of the term "smoke and mirrors" dates to a 1975 Lowell Sun article in reference to journalist Jimmy Breslin.
• The word "escalate" dates to 1922; the original sense was "to use an escalator," which was originally a brand name. The derivative use of the word to mean "to raise/intensify" dates only to 1959.
• The term "brinkmanship" was coined in 1956 by American presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson to criticize Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' professed policy of bringing the Cold War to the brink of nuclear war to force concessions from the Soviet Union.
• The term "pegging", as in using a strap-on dildo to penetrate someone anally, was coined in a 2001 online vote organized by Seattle alternative newspaper The Stranger.
• "Deadpan" was first attested in 1928.
• The word "oink", for the sound a pig makes, first appeared in print in 1917.
• The earliest provable use of the term "deadass" as an intensifier for "serious" dates to its 2003 Urban Dictionary entry.
• The word "relatable", in the sense of enabling empathy ("That's so relatable" etc.), is first attested in 1965, being first used among psychologists.
• The word "slob", as in an untidy person, sounds like Old English but only dates to 1887. It is derived from the Irish word "slaba", meaning a piece of muddy land.
• The word "sucks" in the sense of "bad" (e.g., "that movie sucks") is first attested in 1971 and was considered vulgar for quite a while because of the oral sex connotations, only becoming mainstream in The '90s.
• The word "bloodlust" was coined in 1847 by British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
• The word "tuna" first appears in English in 1881, as a loanword from American Spanish. The older English word for the fish, dating to the 16th century, was "tunny".
• The earliest known use of the word "prompt" as a noun, as in the term "essay prompt", dates to 1983.
• The term "woobie" derives from the 1983 film Mr. Mom, in which it is a child's word for his security blanket.
• The term "virtual reality" was coined by computer scientist Jaron Lanier in 1987.
• "Touch grass", in the sense of "go outside" and aimed at people who seem to spend so much time online that they've developed Skewed Priorities, started getting used on Twitter in 2015.
• The earliest attestation of the term "around the clock" dates to 1915 and was originally in reference to World War I factory production.
• The OED's earliest citation for the phrase "At the end of the day", in the sense of "When all is said and done", dates to 1974.
• The oldest known usage of the term "spot-on" to mean "perfect" or "excellent" dates to 1958, and it was originally a Britishism; the first known American usage dates to a 1985 New York Times article.
• The earliest attestation of the term "screentime" in the sense of the "amount of time something spends on-screen in a work" dates to 1999.
• The first known use of the term "going postal", meaning "going insane", dates to a December 1993 article in Florida newspaper The St. Petersburg Times.
• The Philadelphia slang term "jawn", meaning "thing", is first recorded in print in the 1990s. Even in embryonic spoken form as "joint", the earliest known use of the term dates only to 1981.
• The earliest known instance of the word "heartbeat" dates to 1850.
• The verb "update" was first attested in 1944, and its noun form in 1967.
• The term "Generation X", in reference to the generation following the Baby Boomers, only gained common usage after Canadian author Douglas Coupland published the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture in 1991. Generation X had previously been the name of the Punk Rock band from which Billy Idol made his Breakup Breakout. Even then, Coupland used the term to describe people around his age (he was born in 1961). Only later did the term start shifting forward to describe seventies babies. Before then the less snappy "13th Generation" or "13ers", coined by the authors of the book Generations, was the name that had been used.
• The word "check" in the sense of "examine" or "mark" dates to 1928 and derives from Chess. In fact, all meanings of the word "check" derive from the chess sense (and thus, from the Persian word shah, meaning "king").
• "Fun" seems like it should be an ancient word, but the earliest record of it dates to 1727.
• The term "red-handed" as in "caught red-handed" (i.e., caught in the act of committing a crime) was first used by Walter Scott in his novel Ivanhoe (1819).
• The earliest-known use of the term "gaming the system" dates to an engineering conference in 1975.
• The word "gobbledygook", as in nonsense, was coined in 1944 by Texas politician Maury Maverick; according to him, it was meant to evoke turkey noises.
• The earliest unambiguous media use of the word "toast" in the sense of "defeated" or "dead" (as in, "You are toast!") was a Bill Murray ad-lib in Ghostbusters (1984). This is a controversial citation, though, as many people have reported that the slang was in circulation long before that, but confirming evidence has never really been presented (the term "on toast", meaning "at the mercy of someone else"—I have him on toast now—dates back to the 1800s, but isn't quite the same thing).
• The word "grody" or "grotty", a shortening of "grotesque", was coined by The Beatles for their 1964 film A Hard Day's Night.
• The phrase "a piece of the action" dates only to 1965. It is often anachronistically associated with the mobster culture of The Roaring '20s, due to its extensive use in that context in the 1968 episode of Star Trek: The Original Series called... "A Piece of the Action".
• The word "cringeworthy" is first attested in 1990, and the adjectival use of "cringe" is even newer.
• The term "misogyny" has some isolated uses from the 17th century, but it wasn't common at all until the 1970s and the rise of second-wave feminism. Its Spear Counterpart, "misandry", was first attested in 1989.
• The term "domestic violence" was coined by British Labour MP Jack Ashley in an address to Parliament in 1973.
• The earliest attestation of the word "gross" in the sense of "disgusting" dates to 1958.
• In 1955, only one Fortune 200 corporation had an executive with the title "Chief Executive Officer"; twenty years later, in 1975, all of them did, per this study. The earliest citation for the abbreviation "CEO" in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1972. Prior to the term "CEO" (and later "C-suite" derivative job titles) being adopted, the head of a company was generally referred to simply as the "President".
• The term "cold shoulder" was coined by Walter Scott in 1816.
• "Parliament" as the group noun for rooks and owls sounds like it dates to the Middle Ages like so many other avian collective terms. The OED can only trace the "parliament of rooks" back to 1905, and the "parliament of owls" back to 1968. Note that the latter is over a decade after The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis was published, raising the possibility that the chapter entitled "A Parliament of Owls" coined the term.
• The verb "process", in the sense of registering or examining, along with its derivative forms "processed" and "processing" (e.g., "we're processing your application"), is first attested in 1935, originating in US Army jargon.
• "Shrink" as a cheeky slang term for a psychiatrist appears to have been invented by Thomas Pynchon for The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966 (though he spelled it "pshrink"). It's, obviously, derived from the older "head shrinker" (heard in Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, among other places).
• The term "low profile" was first attested in 1957, originally referring to automobile wheels. The wider sense of "not attracting attention" is from 1970, first in reference to the Nixon administration's policy of partial U.S. disengagement from burdensome commitments abroad.
• The concept of the "27-Club", commonly known to be a group comprised of celebrities (mostly musicians) who died at age 27, didn't become a widespread idea until the 1994 death of Kurt Cobain, even though most of the club's most famous members (such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin) had died decades earlier.
• The term "supermodel" was first coined in 1891 by painter Henry Stacy Marks while interviewed in The Strand Magazine, meaning someone who overacted while posing for a portrait, but its current meaning of one of a fashion model who has reached celebrity status was only coined by journalist Charlotte Curtis for The New York Times in 1967 while writing an article about English fashion model Twiggy and did not become widespread until the late 1980s.
• Merriam-Webster cites 1974 as the earliest citation for "trifecta", which originally meant a bet placed on which horses would finish in the top three slots in a race; it's derived from "perfecta", which was the term for a bet on the top two horses.
• The term catfishing, meaning to assume a fake identity, was coined for the 2010 documentary of the same name.
• The term "overshoot" referring to any species' population exceeding its environment's carrying capacity was coined by ecologist and sociologist William R. Catton in 1980 for his book of the same name.
  • Earth Overshoot Day was first observed in 1987, seven years after it was first coined.
• The word "snide" in the sense of "sneering" or "cynical" was first attested in 1928. Its original sense dates to 1859, being thieves' slang referring to counterfeit coins.
• The term "hinterland" is first recorded in English in 1888, referring originally to the land around a port used to store goods and materials for shipping.
• The word "gonads", meaning "testicles", is first attested in 1880. The slang shortening "nads" dates only to the 1980s.
• The term Magical Negro was coined in 2001 by film director Spike Lee in reference to the films The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) and The Green Mile (1999).
• The term Torture Porn was coined in 2006 by film critic David Edelstein to describe Hostel.
• "Intelligent design" was first attested in 1990, being a euphemism for creationism.
• The term "Anglosphere", referring to the culture of English-speaking countries collectively, dates only to 1995.
• The word "feedback" in the sense of "information about results of a process" dates only to 1955; the original sense derives from electronics (i.e., radio feedback), and dates to 1920.
• Paul Simon's 1980 film (and album) One-Trick Pony may well be the origin of "one-trick pony" as a dismissive term for someone or something that can only do one thing well. "Trick pony" by itself has a long history as a term for a horse used in a circus or live show. A 1905 publication of the Oregon Pioneer Association uses "one-trick-pony", but in context, it clearly refers to a circus with one pony, not a pony with one trick ("the first one-tent, one-clown, one-trick-pony pioneer Oregon circus"). Merriam-Webster's goes with 1980 for its earliest citation.
• The first recorded uses of the terms "curate" and "curated" date to 1979, being a back-formation from "curator". Initially, the terms referred only to tending to museum objects; the more general sense of "curate" as in "sort" dates only to 1990.
• Merriam-Webster's earliest citation for the word "misophonia" (i.e., negative emotional responses to unpleasant sounds) dates to 2001.
• The use of the word "drone" as pejorative for a mindless worker/slave is in reference to radio-controlled aircraft (which are Older Than They Think),^note and so named because an early model was called the drone as a response to a previous "queen bee" and the name stuck. not the caste of bee. Drone bees actually are one of the royal castes of the hive, being the fertile males. Far from mindlessly working, they have perhaps the least strenuous life among bees, only eating and fertilizing virgin queens to make new colonies.
• Merriam-Webster's earliest citation for the term "walk back", meaning "to distance oneself from one's previously stated opinion/position", dates to 2000.
• The earliest known use of the term "man up", as in "become more manly", dates to 1989.
• The term "road rage" is first attested in 1988.
• The earliest citation for the term "down-low", as in "secret", dates to 1992.
• The word "hassle" dates to 1945 in noun form, and 1951 in verb form.
• The term "public intellectual" was coined by American author Russell Jacoby for his 1987 book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe.
• The term "aphantasia", meaning the inability to form a mental picture by thinking, was coined in 2015 for a study by University of Exeter professor Richard Zeman.
• The earliest citations for the term "hard pass", as in a firm refusal, date to 2014.
• "Empathy" was coined in 1908, taking a German psychological term, Einfühlung ("in-feeling"), that itself had only existed since 1873, and creating an English equivalent from a Greek translation of its components (en and pathos).
• Merriam-Webster's earliest citation for "deadname" — i.e., to use a trans person's pre-transition name — dates to 2010.
• "Elephant in the room", in that form, only seems to date to 1985, as a streamlined version of "elephant in the living room", which itself doesn't have an unambiguous citation until 1959. The concept seems to ultimately derive from an 1814 Russian fable called "The Inquisitive Man", where a man goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny details but doesn't notice an elephant on display; Fyodor Dostoevsky cites it by name in Demons.
• Product placement is an old concept, but the term itself dates only to 1982.
• The term "thesaurus" in the sense of "a dictionary of synonyms" was coined by Peter Mark Roget for his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852).
• The earliest-known citation for the phrase "duke it out", meaning "fight", dates to 1971, but "dukes" as in "fists" is about a century older.
• The phrase "no comment" was first used as a stock response to questions in 1950, by White House Press Secretary Charles Ross.
• While the game of kick-the-can has been attested since the 1930s, the earliest provable citation for the expression "kick the can (down the road)", meaning "to delay a problem rather than solve it" dates to 1988, being highlighted in William Saffire's New York Times language column.
• The term "midlife crisis" was coined in a 1965 paper by Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jacques, and it entered the popular lexicon following the release of the 1979 film 10.
• The word "sabotage", in the sense of "deliberate destruction and/or hindrance", is first attested in 1897 in French and 1903 in English. It derives from the French saboter, meaning a wooden shoe. It was still novel enough in 1936 that Alfred Hitchcock's film Sabotage needed to use an early example of a Dictionary Opening to make sure the audience understood the title.
• "Sacred cow" is an Americanism, dating to 1910 and apparently deriving from popular conceptions of Hinduism.
• The phrase "throw under the bus", meaning "to blame someone unfairly", is first attested in 1982. It remained obscure until it was popularized by American news media during the 2008 US presidential election season.
• The term "jerk", meaning "a rude person", has only been common since the 1980s. The older sense, dating to the 1930s, was "a stupid person", probably shortened from "jerk-off". The old meaning of "jerk" was still in use as late as 1979's The Jerk.
• The term "way out", as in "exit", dates to 1926.
• The use of "way" as an intensifier, e.g., "A is way better than B", dates to 1984.
• "Wifebeater" in the sense of "sleeveless shirt" dates to 1990.
• "Pasta" as a term denoting Italian dough-based foods such as spaghetti, lasagna, macaroni, etc., dates to 1874 in Italian, but was seldom used in English until the 1970s. Before then, English speakers (mostly American, since pasta dishes were virtually non-existent in Britain) would've just generically called any pasta "noodles" (outside of spaghetti or macaroni, which also got used as generic terms for pasta).
• The term "senior moment" (i.e., a moment in which a senior acts strangely or absent-mindedly) dates to 1998, probably deriving from "Kodak moment".
• The word "stress" in the sense of "psychological pressure or hardship" dates to 1955, and its adjectival form "stressed" dates only to 1973.
• Although the American Dream is often seen as a foundational ideology of the United States, it was neither named nor articulated until 1931, by historian James Truslow Adams, as a patriotic reaction against the deprivations suffered by the poor (and their consequent cynicism) during the Great Depression.
• The phrase "said the quiet part out loud" dates to 1995, in the episode "A Star is Burns" of The Simpsons. Its use in political discourse (referring to a public figure overtly expressing a controversial opinion that would normally be kept under wraps) dates back to 2012.
• The earliest-known use of the term "sex pest" (i.e., a sexual harasser) appears in a 1985 article in The Times, and the first known American usage dates to 1991.
• The term "middle name" was coined in the American journal Harvardiana in 1835.
• "Core memory", in the sense of an emotionally impactful memory, is not a psychological term but instead was coined in the 2015 movie Inside Out.
• The earliest use of the term "Middle East" by the US government dates to 1958. The term had existed before World War I, but was vaguely defined and often included India and Afghanistan, and frequently overlapped with "Near East". By 1958, it had settled into its modern definition as "the former eastern half of the Ottoman Empire, plus the Arabian Peninsula and Iran."
• The verb form of "orbit" (as in "the planets orbit the Sun") dates only to 1946.
• The term "gas giant" was coined by science fiction author James Blish in 1952.
• The earliest-known published use of the term "brain freeze" to refer to a cold-stimulus headache dates to 1991.
• Merriam-Webster's earliest citation for the term "N-word" as a euphemism for a certain racial slur dates to 1985.
• "Pescatarianism" (an otherwise-vegetarian diet that allows for consumption of seafood) is an ancient concept—Pythagoras is thought to have been one, and The Cathars practiced it as well—but the word was only coined in 1993.
• The phrase "meaning of life" first appeared in Thomas Carlyle's 1833 novel Sartor Resartus.
• The words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" were first attested in 1879; before then, the relevant terms were "deosil" or "sunwise" for clockwise, and "widdershins" for counterclockwise.
• Although hazmat suits were invented during the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910, the word "hazmat" (short for "hazardous material") was not coined until 1977.
• The earliest provable use of the term "resting bitch face" dates to 2013.
• The term "rocket science", in the metaphorical sense of a difficult or complex topic, dates to 1985.
• The earliest-known use of the phrase "lost the plot" — i.e., losing one's ability to cope with events — appears in a 1984 article in The Times, with its first-known American usage dating to a 1998 New York Times column.
• The first known instance of the phrase "piece of cake", in the meaning of "an easy task", dates to 1942, apparently having arisen during World War II as Royal Air Force jargon.
• The word "cull" in the sense of "selective slaughter of animals" dates to 1934.
• The metaphorical use of the term "red line", meaning an action justifying war (or sanctions), dates to 1975, being used by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to describe the US's policy of supporting Arab states as long as they refrained from attacking Israel. The term's first use in American politics appears in a May 1994 Reuters article regarding negotiations with North Korea over the withdrawal of reactor fuel.
• The term "come out of the woodwork", meaning "to emerge from hiding after a period of obscurity", is first attested in 1964.
• The term "waterboarding", referring to a torture technique whereby a victim is tied to a board and doused over their head with water, was coined in 2004, apparently as a euphemism for the earlier term "water torture".
• The word "twentysomething", referring to a person 20-29 years old, dates to 1990. It was derived from the 1987 television series thirtysomething.
• The term "the devil's lettuce", a euphemism for marijuana, sounds like some kind of vintage 1930s-era term used by Jazz musicians or Moral Guardians, but nope. It first appeared in 2003, seemingly spinning off from "the devil's dandruff" a slang term for cocaine that dates to The '70s.
• The word "scam" (i.e., an act of fraud, deception, etc.) is not known to have existed before 1963, apparently arising from carnival jargon.
• The motte-and-bailey fallacy is often listed among classic argumentative fallacies such as strawman, ad hominem, etc., but the term has existed only since 2005, when philosopher Nicholas Schackel coined it.
  • While slightly older, "no true Scotsman" is also very young for a "classic" fallacy, having been first described and labeled by philosopher Antony Flew in 1966.
• While Alison Bechdel first articulated the The Bechdel Test in a 1985 Dykes to Watch Out For strip, the term "Bechdel test" first appeared in 2007.
• Google's earliest results for the term "edge case" date to 1985.
• The earliest-known use of the insult "asshat" dates to a 1998 Usenet post.
• The term "hindsight bias", describing the common phenomenon by which people perceive past events as predictable and inevitable, was coined in 1975 by American academic Baruch Fischhoff.
• The earliest known use of the term "algorithm" — that is, a mathematical procedure — dates to 1926.
• The earliest definitive use of "jamboree" found so far is in a New York newspaper from 1868 and attempts to identify it as a loan word from another language (Hindi, Swahili, various Native American tongues, and even Gaelic have been suggested) have all failed. It only gained widespread use after the Boy Scouts began using it as a name for their gatherings in 1920.
• "Scouse" or "scouser" as a nickname for people from Liverpool dates to the 1800s (derived from a locally-popular type of stew), but it apparently only became well known outside of Merseyside in The '60s, thanks to Alf Garnett using the term to insult his son-in-law Mike on Till Death Us Do Part.
• The term "day off", meaning "a day away from work", dates to 1883.
• The use of the word "morph" in the sense of "transform" dates only to 1987, being originally a shortening of "metamorphosis".
• The h-index, the standard numerical indicator of the worth of a scholar and their publications in academia, was first proposed in 2005 by UC San Diego professor Jorge E. Hirsch.
• The term "boonies", meaning "a remote place", is first attested in 1964, apparently arising among US soldiers stationed in Vietnam and derived from "boondocks". Meanwhile, "boondocks" itself has a convoluted history. It derives from bundók, the Tagalog word for "mountain", and was introduced into American English during the 1899-1902 Philippine-American War, but was largely confined to the military until World War II, when it broke through into civilian usage as a novel variation on slang terms for rural areas like "the sticks". The term really only became widespread thanks to the 1965 hit song "Down in the Boondocks".
• "Acid casualty", referring to someone who sustained damage to their mental health due to heavy use of hallucinogens like LSD, especially applied to musicians like Syd Barrett, is definitely a concept heavily tied to The '60s, but the earliest published use of the term that's been found dates to 1974.
• The term "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD) was coined in 1978, and came to wider attention following its inclusion in the American Psychiatric Assocation's DSM-III manual in 1980.
• The word "nightlife" was coined by Herman Melville for his 1852 novel Pierre.
• Lewis Carroll coined the word "chortle" for his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
• The term "summit" in the sense of "high-level conference" was coined by Winston Churchill in 1950, when he called for the West to have a "parley at the summit" with the Soviet Union.