Twentieth Century Words [Hardcover]

There are many surprises, at least for me. For example, "enthuse" as a verb is not listed because it actually came into use in the 19th Century. "Ska," referring to a kind of popular music of Jamaican origin, first made its appearance in 1964. I would have guessed the eighties as the earliest. "Atomic bomb" amazingly enough first appeared in 1914 (anticipating the Manhattan Project by about thirty years!) in something from H.G. Wells, and in 1917 there was this bit of irony from S. Strunsky, "When you can drop just one atomic bomb and wipe out Paris or Berlin, war will have become monstrous and impossible."

In some of the entries we can see the early development of a word. "Feminazi," for example entered the world of print in 1990 (I would have thought earlier). Ayto quotes the Atlanta Journal and Constitution first using it like this, "Let commie-liberal, femi-nazis and other bleeding hearts quibble over that." Then Rush Limbaugh is quoted in 1992 as saying that the real agenda of the feminazis "is to see that there are as many abortions as possible." By 1994, however the word had become almost benign as in this quote from Ms Magazine: "I fight my way to my destination, finally arriving in bad mood, militant black woman, cranky feminazi."

There's a certain artificiality to dividing the growth of the language by decade, but of course it is a handy organizing device as long as one remembers that, for example, the so called "sixties" really didn't begin until about 1964 when the U.S. got involved in Vietnam, and didn't end until sometime in the early seventies. The etymological history here supports that notion by revealing that "miniskirt" first appeared in 1964, and that "freak" and "freak out," meaning to undergo an intense emotional experience, became words in print in 1965. If you're like me and like to curl up in bed with a good usage dictionary (Bergan and Cornelia Evans's A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957) for example), Twentieth Century Words will not only be a special treat, but a little overwhelming as you realize just how much lexical information you have in your hands. Proscriptive grammarians and those who think we ought to guard the English language the way the French Academy protects French from the horrors of "franglais" should beware since Ayto's user-based collection can offend sensibilities with its democratic bias. The "f-word," for example, appears in various guises, and a lot of not really established slang ("diss," "tubular," etc.) appearing alongside established usages.

There is an index listing the words alphabetically, which is very handy, and a table in the introduction giving examples of some surprising pre-twentieth century coinages, e.g,, "contact lens," "milk shake," "acid rain," etc. Some really recent words that didn't make the book include "bobos" (from the popular book Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks) and "hottie" (for an attractive member of the opposite sex). Ayto writes that there are an average of 900 words per year that come into the language, about 90,000 for the twentieth century, so we have in this book perhaps the most important five or six percent.