Maddox's TV Tropes Sorter/Newer Than They Think/All/Sort by Date

## 16th Century

1. 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.

## Early 16th Century

1. 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.

## 1707

1. 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).

## 1733

1. 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.

## 19th Century

1. 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.

## 1825

1. The word "medieval" first appeared in 1825, a neologism derived from the Latin phrase *medium aevum*. The older word for medieval things was "Gothic".

## 1829

1. 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.*

## 1830s

1. 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.

## 1843

1. The use of the word "type" to mean "a kind of a particular thing" is first attested in 1843; before then, it referred strictly to movable type (i.e., letters used in a printing press.)

## Late 19th Century

1. The Anarchy (an English civil war of 1135-54) wasn't called that until then.
2. 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.

## 1890s

1. 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.

## 1895

1. 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.
2. "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".

## 1910

1. The word "shack" is first attested in 1878, an Americanism originally referring to a wooden hut. The word was first applied to houses in 1910.

## 1911

1. 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.

## 1912

1. 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.

## 1914

1. 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 true global war, not because it is the first of multiple wars.

## 1917

1. The word "camouflage" was coined by the British Army in 1917, modified from the French slang word *camoufler*.

## 1918

1. The word "blah", referring to meaningless or boring speech (as in "blah blah blah"), is first recorded in 1918.

## 1920s

1. 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."

## 1920

1. The word "fundamentalism," as a byword for religious fanaticism, dates only to 1920. You wouldn't know this from how frequently it's applied to people living before this era. Before that, it just literally meant someone who stuck to the fundamentals of their belief system, more along the lines of "traditional", "orthodox", or just "not a heretic".

## 1925

1. The word "gimp", referring to a crippled limb, dates only to 1925.

## 1926

1. "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).

## 1929

1. The first knock-knock joke recorded in print dates to 1929, and they didn't become widely known until the 1950s.

## 1930s

1. 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.

## 1930

1. 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.

## 1933

1. The exclamation "oops" first appears in print in 1933, and "whoops" only slightly earlier, in 1925.

## 1936

1. The word "doodle", defined as a mindless sketch, was coined for the 1936 film *Mr. Deeds Goes to Town*.

## 1941

1. 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.

## 1943

1. 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.

## 1944

1. 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*.

## 1947

1. "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.

## 1950s

1. 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.

## 1950

1. 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.

## 1951

1. *Daffy Duck* invented the pronunciation of despicable with a silent "E" in 1951.
2. 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.

## 1952

1. 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".

## 1954

1. 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.

## 1955

1. 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*.

## 1956

1. 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.
2. The word "environment", in the ecological sense of "the natural world" (as opposed to i.e. cities and industry), is first recorded in 1956; its variants are more recent still, with "environmentalist" dating to 1970 and "environmentalism" to 1972.

## 1957

1. 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 prior to this.

## 1960s

1. 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.

## 1961

1. 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).

## 1968

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. The expression "No way!" is first attested in 1968.
4. The word "prat" as British slang for a contemptible person is first attested in 1968.

## 1970s

1. 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.
2. 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.

## 1970

1. The earliest known use of the word "kerfuffle" dates to 1970.

## 1975

1. 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.
2. The term "ebonics" was coined by American professor R.L. Williams for his 1975 book of the same name.
3. The phrase "inside the Beltway" was first used as a metonym for the US government in 1975. The Capital Beltway Road surrounding Washington DC, to which the term refers, has existed only since 1961.

## 1976

1. 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.

## 1977

1. "Glitzy" is a recent loanword from Yiddish, dating only to 1966. "Glitz" is even more recent, being first attested in 1977.

## 1978

1. 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*.

## 1980s

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

## 1980

1. "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.
2. The term "high five" first appeared in print in 1980 and the gesture itself cannot be proven to exist before the 1970s, though its predecessor, the "low five", is recorded in African American communities at least as far back as WW2.

## 1981

1. Although serial killers have existed for centuries, the term "serial killer" itself is 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.
2. The earliest known use of the term "outsourcing" in print dates to 1981.
3. 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.
4. 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.

## 1983

1. 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.
2. The earliest citation for the saying "shut your pie-hole" dates to Stephen King's 1983 novel *Christine*.
3. 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.

## 1984

1. 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 from a loss into a win with careful application of social psychology.

## 1985

1. 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.

## 1986

1. Similarly, "downsize" dates only to 1986.

## 1987

1. The term Steampunk was coined by K. W. Jeter in 1987. The term "cyberpunk" barely precedes it and is first attested in 1986.
2. The term "pearl-clutching", meaning puritanical or prudish, does not appear in print prior to 1987; its use was popularized in a series of skits on *In Living Color!* in the early 1990s.
3. 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.

## 1988

1. The term "unibrow" (i.e. eyebrows joined together by a bridge of hair in the middle) is first attested in 1988.
2. The term "story arc" — and, by extension, all derivative uses of the word "arc" — was coined in 1988 for the TV series *Wiseguy*.

## 1990s

1. 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".

## 1990

1. 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.)
2. The term "poster child", referring to a representative of an idea or cause, is first attested c. 1990.
3. To "have issues", in the sense of having personal problems (e.g., "that guy has issues"), is first attested in 1990.

## 1991

1. The word "screenshot" is first attested in 1991. In fact, the use of the word "shot" to refer to a photograph, or camera angle dates only to 1958.

## 1992

1. 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.

## 1993

1. 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.

## 1994

1. 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.
2. 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.

## 1995

1. 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.
2. 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.

## 1996

1. 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).
2. The term "snowflake", in the sense of a coddled person, was coined by Chuck Palahniuk for his 1996 novel *Fight Club*.

## 1997

1. 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.

## 1998

1. The play *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 Bill Clinton's provocations of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Even then, the term was obscure until the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, when it rapidly caught on in the mainstream press.
2. The use of the word "demographic" as a noun, dates only to 1998.

## 1999

1. 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.

## 2000s

1. 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".
2. 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.

## 2001

1. 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.
2. 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*.

## 2002

1. The word "snark", in the sense of "cynical yet delightfully witty" that this site uses (such as on Deadpan Snarker), dates to 2002.

## 2003

1. 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.
2. The term "net neutrality" was coined in 2003 by Columbia law professor Tim Wu.
3. 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)*.
4. 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".

## 2005

1. The phrase "Boom goes the dynamite!" was invented in 2005 by Ball State University student Brian Collins during a sports newscast.
2. 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.

## 2007

1. "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.

## 2008

1. 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*.

## 2009

1. 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.

## 2010

1. 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.
2. 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".

## 2014

1. 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".

## 2015

1. The earliest-known use of the term "touch grass" in the sense of "go outside" dates to 2015.

## 2017

1. 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.