11 Slang Terms With Surprising Historical Origins
by N/A, 9 years ago |
1 min read
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"Recency illusion" is a term in linguistics that refers to us believing words we've heard a lot in recent years is a brand new word, when in fact it is incredibly old. There are plenty of words that we use all the time now that we probably think are brand new, but in reality have been around for MUCH longer than most of the people using them.
1. Swag meaning something similar to cool.
Swag was used in this context as early as 1640 in "The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt" by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger.
2. Cool meaning hip or awesome.
Many people think this one originated in the '60s, but it came to mean fashionable 30 years earlier than that.
3. Literally meaning figuratively
People like to get all bent out of shape about this one, but we're sorry to tell you that this type of hyperbole has been used for LITERALLY years. An example of literally being used for something that LITERALLY did not happen appeared in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens in 1839.
4. Bae
Believe it or not, the first instance of bae appeared in the early 1990s in the New Yorker. It started as "bae bae" an obvious take on "baby." The second bae was dropped sometime after 2000.
5. Baby as a term of an endearment
Bae's origin has been in use since at least 1901, possibly as far back as 1839.
6. High to mean on drugs
While it may seem like the epitome of a hippie word, high was used in reference to drugs since at least 1932. All the way back in the 1670s, it meant drunk.
7. Onesie
Onesies may be all the rage with teenagers now, for some reason, the word was originally trademarked by Gerber in 1984, referring to of course the item of clothing for a baby.
8. Dude is much older than Bill and Ted
The first ever use of dude was way back in 1882 as an abbreviation of "Yankee doodle."
9. OMG
“I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)†That's what Lord Fisher wrote to Winston Churchill in a letter in 1917. It may be the first time it appeared, but he did kind of defeat the purpose by writing it out as well.
10. Snark
Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark was published in 1876, but that has a much different meaning than what we know it as today. The term "snarky" goes back to 1886, and then "snark" as we know it today was coined in 2002.
11. Hipster
Hipster was first recorded as being used in 1941, and the meaning hasn't really changed all that much since then.
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