History NewerThanTheyThink / Terms

* The earliest unambiguous media use of the word "toast" in the sense of "defeated" or "dead" (as in, "You are toast!") was a Creator/BillMurray ad-lib in ''Film/{{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 phrase "meaning of life" first [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_of_life#Origin_of_the_expression appeared]] in Thomas Carlyle's ''Sartor Resartus'' (1833).

* The term [[https://www.newsmuseum.pt/en/spin-wall/spin-room "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 from a loss into a win with careful application of social psychology.

* Pyrokinesis is a term invented by Creator/StephenKing 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 OlderThanTheyThink.

* The term "friends with benefits" was coined by Music/AlanisMorissette in her 1995 song "Head Over Feet".

* 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.

* "Sacred cow" is an Americanism, [[https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/1910 dating to 1910]] and apparently deriving from popular conceptions of Hinduism.

* The play ''Film/{{Gaslight}}'' debuted in 1938, but the term spawned from it, "gaslighting"--meaning to abuse someone psychologically by falsely accusing them of misremembering things--was first used circa 1998 by columnist Maureen Dowd in reference to [[UsefulNotes/BillClinton Bill Clinton's]] provocations of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Even then, the term was obscure until the 2016 presidential campaign of UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump, when it rapidly caught on in the mainstream press.

** Records weren't even made of vinyl before UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo; until then, they were made of shellac.

** Records weren't even made of vinyl before the 1950s; until then, they were made of shellac.

* 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 Website/TVTropes, dates only to the 1980s.

* Although the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream American Dream]] is often seen as a foundational ideology of the United States, it was neither named nor articulated until 1931, as a patriotic reaction against the deprivations suffered by the poor during the Great Depression.

* "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 "spaghetti" or "macaroni".