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NEW WORDS FOR A NEW CENTURY Some words we use every day have descended to us from thousands of years ago. Words like glimmer, glisten, gleam, glow and glad all come from a prehistoric root word, ghel, meaning “to shine.” Other common terms, however, are so new you won’t find them in most dictionaries. For example, my Random House Unabridged Dictionary published in the early 90’s contains no entries for internet, webpage, or search engine. Even so, some of today’s unabridged dictionaries are twice as thick as those of a hundred years ago. Tens of thousands of new words have come into our language this century, terms which recall key events of the last ten decades and which reflect the temper of our times. One of the dominant personalities in early twentieth-century The Teens of this century are remembered now for World War One, in which
American soldiers were called doughboys, after the hard-boiled dumplings
which so often made up their fare. With new weapons such the tommy gun (Thompson submachine gun) and Big Bertha, a
great seige gun nicknamed for Berta
Krupp, head of Germany’s
greatest munitions factory, it is no wonder that many of the doughboys became
shell-shocked. (The same condition would be called battle fatigue in World
War Two, and post traumatic stress disorder in the The Roaring Twenties were dubbed the Jazz Age by that debonair debauchee, F. Scott Fitzgerald. And indeed the slang of jazz musicians from that decade has made its way into the popular mainstream. Their jive (from gibe, “to taunt or jeer”) included terms still common today, such as gig, cool, hip, and square. The Thirties are popularly remembered for the Great Depression and the rise of organized crime. Though Prohibition was repealed in 1933, words such as speakeasy and bootleg remained commonplace throughout the decade. (In a speakeasy, of course, one should keep one’s voice down, since illegal alcohol is being served; bootleg derives from the practice of hiding contraband inside of one’s boots.) The term Mafia also came into common parlance in the 30’s. Actually, this term originated in the 1870’s, from a Sicilian word denoting courage or bravura. All that joblessless and lawlessness might make one yearn for Shangri-La, the remote paradise created by James Hilton in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon. With the Forties came another World War, and we easily recognize words such as Nazi, Gestapo, and blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) from their associations with the Third Reich. Even if you feel like you’re catching a lot of flak, you probably don’t have it as bad as those who encountered the real thing. Flak is short for “FLieger-Abwehr-Kanone,” anti-aircraft gun. (Nowadays football quarterbacks wear flak-jackets to protect their ribs from--what else?--the Blitz.) On the Allied side, there are dozens of examples of soldier’s
slang from World War Two still in use today--though many of them are not
printable here. Suffice to say calling a soldier a G.I. dates from this
period, after the letters “G. I.” (Government Issue) stamped on most The bomb which closed out World War Two also inaugurated the Nuclear Era. The term fallout to describe airborne particles settling back to earth dates from this period. Of course, now the term has become generalized to refer to any unexpected or unwelcome aftereffects. The word “megaton” comes from the early fifties, measuring the power of nuclear bombs in terms of millions of tons of TNT. Two related terms from the same period are megadeath to describe mass destruction, and megabucks, to describe the costs of the expensive new weaponry. Societal fallout from the tensions of the Cold War began to emerge in the
Sixties, when a counter-culture emerged among America’s
youth. Interestingly, most of the terms we associate with the The Sixties also contributed a wealth of new terms in the sciences, such biodegradable and quasar (short for “quasi-stellar body”). The term “cyborg” (shortened from cybernetic organism) was popularized in the fiction of that decade, though the term was actually coined in 1948 from the Greek word kybernetes, "helmsman, guide." (The same word shows up in the motto of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. The Greek letters PBK are initials for the phrase, philosophia biou kybernetes, "philosophy, life's guide.") The Seventies are probably best remembered for the end of the Vietnam War
and the end of the Nixon presidency. With the first conflict came wide
recognition of the term napalm (short for Napthene Palmitate), a jelly-like incendiary substance which was
actually invented in World War Two. The The hippies of the sixties were replaced by the Yuppies of the Eighties, a term coined early in the decade for Young Urban Professionals. One associates the term “trickle down theory” with the Reaganomics of the 80’s, but actually the term-- and the assertion that a robust economy benefits all classes of society--can be traced back to the 50’s. The 80’s also brought the first use of the term modem, short for modulator-demodulator, a device for transmitting data over phone lines which has led to a whole new internet vocabulary for the Nineties. No one can yet say what phrases from the 90’s will become a permanent part of our language. Apart from terms mentioned above, I believe that two likely candidates are “new world order,” used by George Bush to describe the post-Cold War global community. Other possibilities are “ethnic cleansing” and “hedge funds,” two current reminders that order of any sort is never a foregone conclusion. These are only guesses, of course. It was the Greek playwright Euripides who
observed 24 centuries ago, “What we look for does not come to pass; God finds
a way that none foresaw.”
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