Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

Dating Words

By Herbert Puchta and Mario Rinvolucri

Level : Upper Intermediate to Advanced Time : 15-30 minutes

Preparation
Make a list of words that you are confident most of the class are familiar with, or use the example list given below. Make enough copies for each student or group of students.

In class

1. Ask the students to work either alone or in groups of 2-3.

2. Give out one copy of the word list to each student or group.

3. Ask the students to write next to each word the approximate year when it was first used in English.

4. Get the students/groups to join together to compare their answers.

5. Ask them to check their answers against an appropriate dictionary, or, in the example below, give out the answer sheet. For newer words, we recommend John Ayto, 20th-Century Words, Oxford University Press 1999. For older words, the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) gives dated citations of almost every word defined.

Example

LIST OF WORDS AND PHRASES

poverty line	green (=ecological)	car bomb
nappy	crew-cut	jingle (noun)
think-tank	carer	sitcom
pylon	drop-out	genocide
fab	gremlin	in-house
doodle	rock & roll	cassette

ANSWER SHEET

[entries are taken from John Ayto, 20th-Century Words, Oxford University Press 1999]

car bomb n (1972) a bomb concealed by terrorists in a car, especially in one that is parked
1972 Times: The explosion of a car bomb without warning in a loyalist street.

carer n (1978) a person whose occupation is the care of the sick, aged, disabled, etc. Also applied to someone who looks after a disabled or elderly relative at home, often at the expense of her or his own career. A modern specialization of carer 'one who cares', which dates back at least to the 17^th century. The related adjective caring (as in caring professions) is first recorded in 1976 (see caring (1966) )
1978 Age & Ageing: A much lower proportion of patients with chief carers in social classes one and two were admitted than those in thre, four and five.
1982 Times: More money should be spent on the carers – those people, mainly women and mainly unpaid, who look after old and handicapped relations. cassette n (1960) a closed container of magnetic tape with both supply and take-up spools, so designed that it needs merely to be inserted into a suitable tape recorder, computer, or video recorder to be ready for use. The invention which transformed the cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorder into something handily portable that could be listened to on the move
1960 Tape Recording and Hi-Fi Yearbook 1959-60: One of the new decks… is the first British product designed to operate with cassettes.

crew-cut n (1940) a closely cropped style of hair-cut for men (apparently first adopted by boat crews at Harvard and Yale Universities). In the 1940s and 1950s it became almost a symbol of stereotypical virile American youth. The term is foreshadowed by crew-cropped, which never caught on to the same extent ('Wilson noted his crew-cropped hair', Ernest Hemingway (1938)). First recorded in the form crew haircut; crew-cut itself is not known to have put in an appearance before 1942.
1940 Time: Doe-eyed Lucille Ball… gets the affections of Richard Carlson, whose crew haircut makes him the first genuine-looking Princeton undergraduate in cinema history.
1942 R. King: A steward… with a sparkling crew cut of chestnut hair.

doodle n (1937) an aimless scrawl made by a person while his or her mind is more or less otherwise applied. The related verb is also first recorded in 1937
1937 Literary Digest: 'But everybody doodles.' So Gary Cooper, as Longfellow Deeds, in 'Mr. Deeds Goes to Town', defended himself. He wasn't crazy because he drew squares and circles on scraps of paper – he was just 'doodling'.
1942 Punch: Mr. Clement Attlee, the Premier's deputy, industriously drew doodles of intricate pattern.

drop-out n (1930) someone who withdraws from participation, especially in a course of study or in society in general. Colloquial, originally US. First recorded in 1930, but the 1960s and 70s were the word's heyday
1930 Saturday Evening Post: The drop-outs are usually those with inferior mental capacity.
1960 Times: The bored students – mostly boys – and the 'drop outs'.
1967 New Statesman: An international gathering of misfits and drop-outs, smoking pot and meditating in the Buddhist temples.

fab adj (1957) wonderful, marvellous. Slang. A shortening of fabulous (which is not recorded in print in this sense until 1959). The usage really took off around 1963, when it became attached to the Beatles (sometimes called 'The Fab Four') and other Merseyside pop groups. After lying dormant for a while, it enjoyed a revival in the 1980s (see fabbo (1984) )
1963 Times: She stretched her stockinged toes towards the blazing logs. 'Daddy, this fire's simply fab.'
1963 Meet the Beatles. Most of the Merseyside groups produce sounds which are pretty fab.
1988 National Lampoon: 'And I just think it's fab!'

genocide n (1944) the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group. A term coined specifically in response to the Nazis' slaughter of six million Jews (about two-thirds of European Jewry) in concentration camps during World War II. See also Holocaust (1957) )
1944 R. Lemkin: By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.
1945 Sunday Times: The United Nations' indictment of the 24 Nazi leaders has brought a new word into the language – genocide. It occurs in Count 3, where it is stated that all the defendants 'conducted deliberate and systematic genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and national groups…'

green adj (1972) relating to or supporting environmentalism, especially as a political issue; belonging to or supporting an ecological party. Also used more loosely to mean 'environmentalist, ecological'. The association of the colour green with the environmentalist lobby, especially in Europe, dates from the early 1970s in West Germany, notably with the Grüne Aktion Zukunft, Green Campaign for the Future', and the grüne Listen, 'green lists (of ecological election candidates)', both of which emerged mainly from the campaign against nuclear power stations. Its initial manifestation in English was as part of the name of Greenpeace, an international organization which campaigns in support of conservation and the protection of the environment. See also greens (1978) )
1972 R. Keziere: A bringing-together of the peace and environmental movements… Greenpeace seemed like a concept that might create such an alliance.
1978 Economist: European politics are turning green; or so the ecologists would have us believe.
1979 Now!: The rebuff to 'green', environmentalist ideals is displayed by the drop in the Centre Party's vote from 24 to 18 per cent.
1985 Sunday Times: The 5,000-strong Ecology Party swapped its 'too middle class' name for the Green Party at its annual conference in Dover yesterday.

gremlin n (1941) a mischievous sprite imagined as the cause of mishaps to aircraft. Originally R.A.F. slang. Despite numerous conjectures (see, for example, the second quote below), its precise origins are unclear, but presumably its ultimate model was goblin. Later usage has broadened out to cover a general embodiment of mischance
1941 Charles Graves: As he flew round, he wished that his instructor had never told him about the Little People – a mythological bunch of good and bad fairies originally invented by the Royal Naval Air Service in the Great War… Those awful little people, the Gremlins, who run up and down the wing with scissors going 'snip, snap, snip', made him sweat.
1942 Observer: Behaviour of… machines couldn't always be expained by… laws of aerodynamics. And so, lacking a Devil, the young fliers… invented a whole hierarchy of devils. They called them Gremlins, 'on account of they were the goblins which came out of Fremlin beer bottles'. They were the genii loci of the R.A.F. messes in India and the Middle East, where Fremlin's beer bottles were plentiful.
1944 Times: The King said that on his way back from Italy they thought they heard a gremlin in the royal aeroplane.
1959 New Statesman: Unfortunately the misprint gremlin has raised its ugly head in my letter to you on 18 April.

in-house adj, adv (1956) (done) internally within a business or other institution, without outside assistance
1966 Electronics: Under the new arrangement it's expected that more of the work will be done in-house at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
1973 R. W. Burchfield: Making full use… of in-house photocopying facilities.

jingle n (1930) a short verse or song in a radio or television commercial or in general advertising. A word which in its very sound seems to encapsulate the perceived annoyingness and triviality of 20^th-century advertising. It is a specific usage of the more general sense 'a simple, repetetive, catchy rhyme or tune', which dates back to the 17^th century
1930 A. Flexner: Let the psychologists study advertising… in order to understand what takes place when a jingle like 'not a cough in a carload' persuades a nation to buy a new brand of cigarettes.
1972 Diana Ramsay: The jingle, a singing commercial for a detergent, was being recorded.

nappy n (1927) a piece of material worn by a baby to absorb excreta. Mainly British. As the first quotation shows, it was originally a nursery version of napkin (which dates in this meaning from the first half of the 19^th century), but by the end of the century it had become the standard British term, and napkin was all but forgotten
1927 W. E. Collinson: Mothers and nurses use pseudo-infantile forms like pinny (pinafore), nappy (napkin).
1938 Stephen Spender: The babe's scream till the nurse brings its nappy.

poverty line n (1901) a minimum level of income consistent with a decent standard of living. First used as a socio-economic term by B. S. Rowntree in his 1901 book Poverty. See also bread-line (1900)
1901 Winston Churchill: Families who cannot provide this necessary sum, or who, providing it, do not select their food with like discrimination are underfed and come below the 'poverty' line.

pylon n (1923) a lattice-work metal tower for overhead electricity lines. One of the most obvious marks of the 20th century on the countryside. Hitherto, a pylon had been 'an ancient Egyptian monumental gateway' (its original meaning) and 'a tower for guiding pilots'
1923 E. Shanks: Half a mile up the mountain, a cable, a thin black line, traversed the crystal air, borne up on pylons.
1930 W. H. Auden: Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires.

rock & roll, rock 'n' roll n (1954) a type of popular dance-music characterized by a heavy beat and simple melodies, combining elements of rhythm and blues with country and western music. Originally US. The expression, which in Black English is a euphemism for sexual intercourse, had been used in connection with popular dancing since at least the 1930s (there is a 1934 song by S. Clare called 'Rock and Roll'), but this specific conjunction of music and name had to wait until the early 1950s. The spelling rock 'n' roll is first recorded in 1955, the derivative rock'n'roller in 1956. See also rock (1957)
1954 Billboard: Alan Freed… will sponsor his first 'Rock and Roll Jubilee Ball' at the St Nicolas Arena here on January 14 and 15.
1955 Life: But parents and police were startled by other rock 'n' roll records' words which were frequently suggestive and occasionally lewd… On a list of 10 top juke box best-selling records last week, six were r'n'r.

sitcom n (1964) a contraction of situation comedy, 'a television or radio comedy programme in which the humour is derived from the reactions of a regular set of characters to a range of situations' (first recorded in 1953). Originally US
1964 Life: Even Bing Crosby has succumbed to series TV and will appear in a sitcom as an electrical engineer who happens to break into song once a week.

think-tank n (1959) a research institute or other organization providing advice and ideas on national or commercial problems; an interdisciplinary group of specialist consultants. The term was originally a facetious US colloquialism for 'the brain' (first recorded in 1905)
1959 Times Literary Supplement: Even the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton does not quite meet the bill, nor does the 'think tank', the Center for Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto.
1968 Sunday Times: The private research corporations, or 'think tanks' (in the current American terminology) which are paid, mostly by departments of Government, to think about problems.