[29/365] I like that I'm also as old as "woo-hoo" and "textualize" though

[cosmolinguist]

Today at work (damn, it's a good thing my work is a source of fun and anecdotes because it's not like I do anything else to talk about these days) L was telling me about the Merriam-Webster "what word is as old as you?" page. Well you can put in any year, of course, not just the year you were born, but that's what he'd done for himself so he could tell me "I'm as old as the word cisgender."

(Or at least, as old as the earliest citation that has been included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which will be like when it first appeared in edited prose and was spotted by a lexicographer, words are always used a lot in speech before they're documented like this (usually; L was also telling me that "covid-19" set a record for shortest time between when it was coined and when it ended up in the M-W dictionary: 34 days).)

J had some awesome words; we tried to string them all together into a story: the himbos and emo students of queer theory went to an illegal rave in a field had a mosh pit that later got mistaken for crop circles.

When L looked up my year of birth, he said, "Oh! You're as old as ableism!" And for some reason that struck all three of us disabled people as funny.

Comments

[purplerabbits]

I get some great words, including acidhead and mind-blowing :-)

[cosmolinguist]

Those are great!

[kshandra]

Appropriately enough, I'm as old as love handles. ;-)

[cosmolinguist]

Love handles are fabulous. :)

[laticauda]

oh cool, i'm as old as protoceratops and supermoon!

[cosmolinguist]

Those are both such cool things!

[lilysea]

I'm as old as cosmic background radiation!

[The phrase, not the radiation]

[lilysea]

I'm as old as:
beta-endorphin
endorphin
Ethernet
meme
meta-analysis
narratology
nootropic
positron-emission tomography
Second Gentleman
smart-mouthed
supergravity

[silveradept]

Oh, gods, the words I got for the year I chose firmly slot into two very important things - the explosion of technology (so things like CD-ROMs and WANs, point-and-click, and newbs) and the AIDS crisis, with a smattering of other medical and medical tech inventions. It's pretty Dickensian.

(There's also a small amount of politics in there, where we see FLOTUS and superdelegates appear.)

[softfruit]

I’m from the “factoid” era, which feels pleasingly self referential.

[barakta]

1980 - I love that you can categorise words into some categories including:

Medical/science
Alpha / beta / gamma + interferon
HLTV (a type of virus HIV falls under, and it was originally called HLTV-3)
Insulin dependent diabetes mellitus
PET Scan
PTSD
Tendinopathy
Working memory

Computingish
DRAM
Co-processor
Graphics tablet (bearing in mind most OSes were not graphical at this point)
Groupware (Novel Netware is the first I can think of and I guess what Office 365 has become)
Kerning
Non-interlaced
TCP/IP
Usenet
Voice Mail

Cultural
Comb over (can't believe that wasn't more recorded given the prevalence of such in the 70s, although the decades don't catch up culturally as they do on-the-decade itself... )
Electronica
Eco + tourism / feminism / terrorism
Euro (it was still called an ECU into the 90s I think)
Differently abled (that needs some swearing!)
Gridlock (Feels very Ben Elton who wrote a book of that name in 1991)
Homeschool
Hijab (How does that work, surely it's just a translation from Arabic or something? Or is it that 'in the West' someone noticed it enough to use it within spoken/written English?).
NIMBY (!!!)
Veg out
Wind farm
yuppie