101 words, and yet I cannot think of a clever title...

October 19, 2004 9:33 AM

101 years in 101 words
posted by Orange Goblin (14 comments total)

Oh yeah, thank goodness we now have the use of a word like "chav" and "ghetto fabulous".

But just how did the term "generation x" get coined back in 1952, a good fifteen years before the generation x began?
posted by fenriq at 10:15 AM on October 19, 2004

i like this.

however, i have a few questions.

why is 'gene' from 1911, but 'DNA' not appearing until 1944?

Wonderbra? 1947? Was there another product with the same name?

It-girl in 1968? i didn't think Clara Bow lived that long.

tiddly-om-pom-pom?

hip is still hip and will always be hip. except when it's hep.
posted by Miles Long at 10:47 AM on October 19, 2004

Wow that was wierd. The Sex Pistols came up on my winamp right as that picture of Jonny Rotten loaded on my screen. Freaky
posted by trbrts at 10:49 AM on October 19, 2004

1981: Toyboy

Wouldn't that be "boytoy?" Did we learn nothing from Madonna?
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 11:37 AM on October 19, 2004

Miles Long-
Mendelian gene theory came long before the discovery of DNA, which is why 'gene' showed up first. I thought Mendel was closer to the 1800-1850s, though, but I could be wrong. Mendelian gene theory is the whole idea of recessive or dominant genes, which he figured out with pea plants
posted by stoneegg21 at 12:21 PM on October 19, 2004

Mendel was mid-19th Century, stoneegg, but the Beeb has it right: the word "Gene" was coined in 1911 by Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen.
posted by Ufez Jones at 1:06 PM on October 19, 2004

Nice list but a bit confusing.

psychedelic in 1957? A bit premature.
URL in 1992? I disbelieve this one.
mobile phone in 1945? Really? People used this term regularly in 1945?

And some of the lamer Britticisms flew over my head.
posted by euphorb at 1:13 PM on October 19, 2004

1959 cruise missile

This all seems a bit fishy to me.
posted by briank at 1:36 PM on October 19, 2004

psychedelic, FWIW. Haven't found anything on Cruise Missile, but ICBM's (as a term) were around as early as 1955.

A lot of these terms were probably coined as the concepts and prototypes were being developed, which makes them etymologically correct, even if 99.99% of society had no clue to them.
posted by Ufez Jones at 1:49 PM on October 19, 2004

Well, and rereading the link, I see that " A study of when new words became common during the past century has had some surprising findings". Seems like that *would* be really difficult to pinpoint.
posted by Ufez Jones at 1:51 PM on October 19, 2004

URL in 1992: RFCs for everyone! (Page 3: "The URI syntax and URL forms have been in widespread use by World-Wide Web software since 1990.")
posted by ook at 2:05 PM on October 19, 2004

A friend of mine who doesn't have a Metafilter account wrote and submitted a 150 word story that uses all 101 of these words, and asked me to post it here:

A whizzo OK Yah teddy bear toyboy powerdressing as hip-hop chav, ghetto fabulous latte gangsta doing dumbed-down beatbox karaoke: “Tiddley-om-Pom-Pom, y’all!”-- bling bling, having it large-- (kitten heeled trainers)-- text-messages hip sexy mobile It-Girl in non-U punk tailspin, hot-desking from botox detox to civvy street: awesome psychedelic love-in at
Big Apple Drive-In. Cool beatniks, spliffs, Wonderbras, miniskirts (sudden-death hemlines), green acid, blue genes: pissed off Generation X DNA buzzing mobile phone ad-libs: “Sex? Naff all. Total Snafu.”

“Blame the hippy peacenik axis of evil: Pesticide, Racism, Hypermarkets, Microchips, Watergate, Big Brother Brainwashing, Fast Food Cheeseburgers, Mickey Mouse, Dunked Bagels, Bossa Nova Kitsch.”

“Begin The Realpolitik Blitzkrieg Boogie: avant-garde
pop wizards plus lumpenproletariat versus celeb sacred
cow megabucks. Google cruise missiles, molotov
cocktails, 9/11.”

“Double-click my URL. Byte my applet. Sex up this
dot-commer?”
“In Virtual Reality,you Trekkie Cyborg. Ceasefire: Demob your U-boat. F-word off.”
Cheerio: the egghead blues.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:30 PM on October 19, 2004

And not to brag, but I've been sexing people up for more than the last two years, and don't let the Beeb tell you any different.

Okay, I'm bragging, then. What of it?
posted by chicobangs at 11:08 PM on October 19, 2004

But just how did the term "generation x" get coined back in 1952, a good fifteen years before the generation x began?

I think it grew out of the recognition that there would in future be a generation following the newly-recognized Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers. X was used as a placeholder, much like the contemporaneous use of Planet X. The later adoption of the term was largely due to Douglas Coupland (he claims he got it from Paul Fussell), but the irony of being named by a placeholder letter seems to have been part of the whole joke from the beginning.

Wonderbra seems an obvious pun on the German Wunderbahr; it doesn't seem to have been used as a brand name until 1968, [also], at least in the US -- but "Wonder Bra" was a natural [cymbals] in the era of the push-up bra, which 1947 certainly was. Frederick's hit "Rising Star" bra -- the Jayne Mansfield look -- was introduced in 1948.

it-girl shouldn't, I think, be confused with the "It" Girl. The original it-girl was, allegedly, Goldie Hawn, and it symbolized something more than hot celebrity -- call it with-it-ness.

psychedelic seems a little late to me, actually; recall that LSD as a hallucinogenic drug was discovered in 1943. The coiner of the term was an early LSD proponent (among other things, he achieved a tremendous 50% success rate at curing alcoholism).

URL is easily 1992. Remember that the hypertext WWW was built on top of protocols evolving from earlier systems such as gophers and that the idea of an always-on net with permanent addresses for everything was only just coming into fruition. bang-paths were not so very long in the past.

The first cruise missile is arguably the SM-62 Snark, which had its origins in the study of the V-series missiles used by Germany. Simply, the term distinguishes jet-powered, winged missiles from their rocket-powered ballistic counterparts. I'm surprised the term wasn't around earlier, myself. The modern computer-controlled super-missile (in the first Gulf War, stories circulated that they flew into Baghdad and turned at street corners) would come much later.

mobile phone in 1945 would obviously have meant a car phone or radio telephone, such as James Bond answers in the teaser for From Russia, With Love, or by Batman -- and which had actually been in use by police and others for a couple of decades. The pocket phone was still in the future, but the mobility was gee-whiz for the time.
posted by dhartung at 12:10 AM on October 20, 2004