Travel Through Time With the Merriam-Webster Dictionary

At some point in their career, every writer is accused of making up words. 

And every writer worth their salt has the same response: Dude, they’re ALL made up.

I never really thought about it when I was growing up. Words were just always… there. You learned to talk, your parents explained things, you read books, watched people on TV, or bent your head to someone you love and shared secrets with them.

Words were always there.

We learned them when our parents sang to us. And when we asked our teachers questions. And when we read books. And when we watched TV. (Thank you, Sesame Street and Electric Company.)

In school, we had huge dictionaries absolutely filled with words. No one MADE those words, or even the books. They always existed. They were formed when the planet was formed, right? Or when Leif Erikson discovered North America in the year 1000.

Except, no. As I’ve often said, English is an ever-changing tapestry. It’s a chaotic, jumbled mess. English is always adding new words to itself, dropping others, and changing the meanings of still others. English is the Borg of languages.

For example, search Merriam-Webster.com for the definition of "literally," and the second item listed is "Virtually; used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible."

In other words, literally means "not literally." As in, I could "literally" eat a horse.

I’m not happy about it. But then again, when I was ten or so, we said something was "bad" when we meant it was really cool, like "That motorcycle is so bad." So, bad meant "good."

That was literally twenty years ago.

You see, English is originally a Germanic language, and Old English was spoken from around the 5th century to the end of the 11th century, about the time Leif Erikson was tromping around Canada, looking for a good place to play hockey.

In fact, if you ever hear Old English spoken, it sounds a lot like German, not like what we speak today. But if you hear Shakespeare, that’s Early Modern English, and we can understand it.

But as English grew and changed, new words entered the lexicon from other languages like French, Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek and Latin, and even Arabic and Korean. We use words from far-off places without realizing they came from somewhere else.

Except now you can find out when your favorite word came into being.

In 2018, the Merriam-Webster website launched its Time Traveler feature that lets you pick a year, like your birth year, and see which words were born in that year.

I scrolled back to my birth year and stopped at 1967, giving myself carpal tunnel syndrome in the process. There, I saw a list of 217 words that are all the same age as me.

I often complain that I don’t share my birthday with anyone cool, but I do share my birth year with several pretty cool words. Society wants us to think that these words are old and smell funny, and that they grunt whenever they get off the couch.

Not true! These are young and vibrant words, and all the other words think they’re hip, and many younger words still swoon and bat their eyes whenever a 1967 word enters the room.

The 1967 words’ wife just rolled her eyes. Politeness prevents me from saying what her dictionary year is, so I’ll just say that I won’t stand for this "microaggression." "Yech!"

One word born in 1967 is "idiocracy," which means "a society governed or populated by idiots." The meaning has become so widely used, there was even a 2006 documentary starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph by the same name. It’s good that we have a name for this kind of thing. You know, in case we’re ever faced with it.

The term "Peter Principle" is another 1967 baby. It happens when "employees tend to rise to the level of their incompetence." In other words, in any company, there is a level where everyone is competent and a real asset to the organization. Then they get a promotion, and that all goes away.

As I wrote this, the most looked-up word was "Dunning-Kruger Effect" (2007), which means "the tendency of individuals with little to no expertise or knowledge in a particular area to overestimate their abilities and competence."

In other words, it means people who think they’re smarter than they really are.

Finally, another magical word that shares 1967 with me is the word "poopy," which is exactly what you think it is. And despite billions of babies throughout creation doing just that, the word wasn’t created until 1967.

Still, it’s a useful word, and it refers to, well, exactly what you think it does. But it also means "not good or pleasant; crappy." As in "Most writers think AI does a poopy job."

In other words, it refers to things that are bad. But are, like, literally bad.

But not "literally bad."

Photo credit: Dictionary entry, PDPics (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Noah1806 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 4.0)

My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.