History NewerThanTheyThink / Terms

* To "have issues", in the sense of having personal problems, is first attested in 1990.

* The word [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot "screenshot"]] is first attested in 1991.

* "Flying saucer" wasn't coined as a term until 1947, when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted a formation of UFO's 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 MemeticMutation.

* The term SpeculativeFiction, as an umbrella term encompassing science fiction and fantasy, did not emerge until the 2000s. While Creator/RobertAHeinlein did [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_fiction coin the term]] in 1947, he used it as a synonym for sci-fi, explicitly ''excluding'' fantasy; writers in the 1960s and 1970s adopted it specifically to mean ''hard'' science fiction, i.e., sci-fi that could actually happen.

* 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".

* The earliest known use of the word "plague" to refer to TheBlackDeath dates to c. 1600, about 250 years after it happened.

* The earliest known use of the word "plague" to refer to UsefulNotes/TheBlackDeath dates to c. 1600, about 250 years after it happened.

* The term "intellectual", as a noun referring to educated people, was first used in France during the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair Dreyfus affair]] of the 1890s.

* The term [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm "perfect storm"]], in reference to a set of circumstances all occurring simultaneously to cause disaster, was coined by writer Sebastian Junger in 1993 in referene to the 1991 Halloween Nor'easter season. He then wrote a book called ''The Perfect Storm'', published in 1997, and adapted into the [[Film/ThePerfectStorm 2000 film of the same name]], from which the term entered popular use.

* The phrase "over the top" in the sense of "beyond the limits" or "too far" is first attested in 1968. It ultimately derives from trench warfare in UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, where to go "over the top" was to launch an attack.

* The term SteamPunk was coined by K. W. Jeter in 1987.

* Many wars have names that were applied centuries after the fact:
** 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 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morisco Moriscos]] during a wave of PatrioticFervor.
*** 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 arised more or less 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 practise of sewing a woollen 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 Creator/WalterScott. 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 [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespeare's]] ''Theatre/HenryVIPart1.''
** 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 a 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 the first true global war, not because it is the first of multiple wars.
* 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 UsefulNotes/WorldWarI -- Manfred von Richtofen, AKA [[TropeNamer The]] RedBaron.
* 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 [[RedScare the atheist Commies]].
** 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 actually 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. AndNowYouKnow.
*** Its [[OlderThanTheyThink associations]] with saluting may come from the fact it's used as a gesture of blessing in the Catholic Church (and possibly the Orthodox Church, too). And they probably 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 back to 1936, in the UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar. As Nationalist General Emilio Mola advanced with four columns of troop on the city of Madrid, he claimed a "fifth column" would rise up 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 almost 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 UFO's 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 MemeticMutation.
** Ironically, "UFO" has come to mean "flying saucer", but in its original USAF coinage [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin means precisely what it says]] -- an airborne phenomenon, apparently 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 nearly as exciting or significant as commonly supposed.
* The words "schadenfreude" and "{{angst}}" have only become part of the English lexicon in last 20 years or so, before then they were purely German words writers sometimes borrowed.

* 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 [[UsefulNotes/CollegiateAmericanFootball football]] competition. The formal establishment of the athletic Ivy League came in 1954, when the Ivy Group Agreement was extended to cover all sports.[[/note]]

* OhGodWithTheVerbing falls into here. Any time you hear someone say "Enough with the..." or "Down with the..." or "Stop with the..." they're paraphrasing Creator/JerryLewis's comedy routines from the 1950s, in which he was originally mimicking the semantic structures of Yiddish.
** Then where does "[[Literature/NineteenEightyFour Down with Big Brother]]" come from?

* 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 TheNewTens. 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.

* The word "massage" is first recorded in English in 1874.