If you’re a writer words are your tools, your world-building blocks, and sometimes you think of them as merely functional, there to serve. You don’t spend much time wondering how or when they came into being, you just reach and use. Or reach and fail to find.
As another birthday has just recently passed, I took to wondering about the words that are as old as I am.
If there’s a defining word for the year of my birth, it has to be Sputnik – but more of that later.
Thanks to a fascinating and informative website – www.wordorigins.org – I found a long list of words and terms that were recorded in print for the first time during my first year on the planet.
Some were a surprise. Headage – as in headage payment (getting paid for each head of livestock in your herd for those Brexiteers with short memories) which I thought must surely have been a 1970s term so firmly associated is it in my mind with EU quotas and butter mountains. Frisbee entered the lexicon the same year – who knew that it was so old? Its etymology comes from the Frisbie bakery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose pie tins had the perfect aerodynamic qualities required for the impromptu park game that became an international phenomenon, and was trademarked using the bakery’s name, with some minor spelling alterations.
As a student journo in Dublin, also in the 1970s, we produced a newspaper from our classroom called the Rathmines Reporter – hands up who remembers? – which was a Getstetner production (an early duplicating machine, a crank-operated forerunner to the photocopier) preceded by a sticky layout process using Cow Gum (great fumes!) and Letraset, which for the uninitiated, was sheets of alphabetic transfers which appeared in 1957, and stuck around.
There are some signs of the political times in the words registered during this year– Cold War terms abound. Overkill, Non-aligned. Now familiar geographical identifiers also came into being. The West Bank was cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, from Jan Morris’s 1957 book, The Market of Seleukia: “It is difficult to see the west bank, which includes the magnificent Old City of Jerusalem, ever being prised away from Jordan,” Morris wrote.
The word may have survived, but not the world it describes.
The Viet-Cong made their first appearance in English language reporting – in Vietnamese it means Vietnamese Communist. Other journalistic terms crept in too – a backgrounder, straight from the world of public relations, apparently. Likewise the Mad Men-inspired Marlboro Man was created and named in 1957. Believe it or not, Marlboro was originally branded as a woman’s cigarette in the 1920s, so the iconic cowboy image was quite a gender shift.
Lego was first trademarked – from the Danish leg godt (play well) as was Play-Doh. And for the older kids, the term pothead.
Airport jargon came into being with the now monetized pre-boarding, a circumlocution, surely. Before boarding, a passenger is simply waiting or queuing. But originally, it referred to a range of activities undertaken by the crew and airport staff before the flight took off. And maybe still does?
Colonoscopy was first termed in 1957 – how I wish I didn’t know what that word means!
I always thought Spanglish was the first English and foreign language blend to be used, but no, apparently the first cited of the ” -lish” hybrids was Chinglish (Chinese/English), also in 1957.
Ahistorical and reverse engineering made their debuts, as did sandfracing (or sandfracking) – a forerunner of today’s plain old fracking. Transexuals were first discussed in psychology journals. Off-off Broadway became a new destination for your debut play. Moisturiser replaced plain old face cream.
But if any word typified the flavour of 1957, it’s the Russian, Sputnik, the name of the first artificial space satellite which was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. “Sputnik” orbited the earth for three weeks before its batteries died; two months later it crashed back into the atmosphere. The launch of Sputnik (literally translated as fellow-traveller of the Earth) triggered the Space Race between the Soviets and the US, and ushered in another phase of the Cold War.
Ironically, the phrase “fellow-traveller”came to be a pejorative term in the US during the 1940s and the 1950s for a person who was sympathetic to, but not a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party.
mary morrissy 