Complex Numbers

Journey to the New Word

From that ivory tower of knowledge known as Cracked, an article about words:

    5 Words That Never Existed Till Oddly Recently  

As December draws to a close, it’s time for the world’s dictionaries to name their Words of the Year.

Yes, this article was from last month.

Most words feel like they must have been around forever. But all words are made-up, and some of them were made-up pretty recently.

My goal in life is to make up a word and have it be widely used. I mean, sure, that's already happened: I came up with "rad" (the slang word, not the radiation level, which admittedly inspired me) back in the 70s. But no one knows it was me, and so no one believes me.

In fairness, someone else might have invented it independently. But I'm going with "they stole it from me."

Anyway. The article:

5. Boy

And yet, the word we have now for a male child, “boy,” isn’t that old. It only came about in the 16th century.

I've looked into this before. Maybe even here; I don't remember. Seems to me there's some debate about the actual origin. In this case, though, I didn't make it up.

Before that, for a few centuries, you know what we called male children? We called them girls. We also called female children girls. “Girl” was a unisex word.

I'm also unclear on the meaning of "we" here. 16th century would have been just after the end of Middle English.

Not to mention there were hundreds or thousands of words added to English since "boy."

4. Guy

For starters, the word was a name for around a thousand years longer than it was a common noun. Then came the big guy, Guy Fawkes.

Ah, yes, one of the prototypical religious terrorists.

To complicate things, I've heard this word pronounced both like it rhymes with "die" or rhymes with "key."

It now refers to people of all genders, though that final shift wasn’t so much a gradual expansion of its meaning as an assumption that any word for men can also represent all humankind.

No, that's not the assumption at all. We're moving away from that as a culture. The problem is that English now lacks a second person plural, and y'all won't adopt y'all, instead opting for "you guys."

3. Smoking

We say a fire is smoking up the place when it creates smoke, so it’s pretty weird that we say the same thing when we (or ham) take in smoke.

Not that weird at all. The smoke is happening whether you're inhaling or not, so sure, smoking is still being used in its older meaning, and this section is interesting but nonsensical.

2. Genocide

Gotta admit, the origin of this word surprised me. Specifically, that it's less than a hundred years old.

The word “genocide” was invented by one man: Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin... The book was published in 1944. By 1948, the U.N. wrote up a treaty criminalizing genocide by name.

1. Forecast

Well, it's not like we needed a word like "aftcast." That would, however, be a fun synonym for "recent history."

By coining the term “forecast,” FitzRoy made the idea sound magical, which wasn’t particularly conducive to convincing skeptical scientists.

Sure, but I bet it got eaten up by the superstitious public.

So, yeah, just some fun with words. Nothing too rad, but I didn't want to just yeet the article into the dustbin.