New Words

Before reading a book called “Made in America” (by Bill Bryson, published in 1994), I never gave much thought to words being added to the dictionary. Of course, I realized that we were suddenly using words we had not grown up with. Some are obvious, like “Laptop” as in a portable computer, a word that had that meaning in the early 1980s but was used generally only when they became ubiquitous, maybe 20 years later. Many more that I had thought were always in my vocabulary, I learned were actually coined long after I was born.

Bryson investigates words through the lens of U.S. history. He writes about names of objects that we thought were the original word, but had actually been changed several times before the final name was settled on. For example, the word “automobile”, concocted from Greek and Latin, had become the popular term for car by 1899, even before there were decent roads to drive them on. Some of the names it was known by before were Machine, Road Engine, Self Motor, Locomotive Car, Motor Buggy, Horseless Carriage, and even a Stink Carriage, and there were more!

1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen

It got me thinking about the quantity of words that have come into our vocabulary in the 21st century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has roughly half a million entries, adding approximately 1,000 words or changes, or additions of meanings per year. The online OED is revised quarterly. Assuming these figures are accurate, there have been 25,000 new words or meanings added since the beginning of this century. To me, that is absolutely mind-boggling.

According to the OED, the word “texting “was first used in the 1950s. The form “to text” began being used in the 1990s and became mainstream as of 2010, possibly as a result of the first iPhone, having was introduced in 2007.

There are words we often understand in context, though we may not have encountered them before, such as “twitterati”; however, I have seen retweet quite often. These were clearly introduced when the Twitter app came into existence in 2006. The name is derived from how we describe birds communicating, short and sweet.

Technology has given us so many additional ways to communicate. A series of oral or video posts on a similar subject has come to be known as Podcasts.

Advertising, of course, has a long history of expanding our vocabulary with terms like “manscaping”, indicating grooming the male body, that way glorifying the use of the razor! How about “binge-watch”? I consider a show that Netflix informs me is worthy of binge-watching, as something so good I will want to watch more than one episode at a time.

Lastly, consider the term “viral”. It is what every advertiser or individual making internet “posts” wants -- to have their message repeated all over the internet.

Come to think of it, I could wish that for my Missives as well.😊