An interesting approach to looking at word origins is to start with a year instead of a word. The Oxford English Dictionary very helpfully provides a list of the words first cited in a particular year. Let’s try 1982. That was the year that Tylenol laced with potassium cyanide killed seven people in and around Chicago (leading directly to the kind of sealed product packaging we struggle with today). It was when EPCOT first opened in Walt Disney World (leading to the kind of sightseeing decisions we struggle with today). And the year that AT&T was broken up into smaller regional phone companies (leading directly to the even bigger and less accountable giants we struggle with today). Not everything in 1982 led to modern struggles, of course; in July a guy named Larry Walters tied some weather balloons to his lawn chair in Long Beach, California, took a seat, and soared up 16,000 feet. But on to the words.
In the medical world, it was in 1982 that AIDS and filovirus (the genus including Ebola) were first named. Several technology-related words made their first appearance as well. Some didn’t last, including camcorder, SCSI, and DAT (digital audio tape; ever see one of those?). But downloadable, cyberspace (coined by William Gibson), netiquette, wysiwyg (what you see is what you get), morph, and spreadsheet are also mentioned (I think the OED is wrong about “spreadsheet”; other sources cite its appearance several years earlier — and the pre-computer paper version shared the name).
The universe of food words expanded in 1982 more by adoption into English than coinage of new words; barista and tiramisu arrived from Italy, taqueria emigrated from Mexico, and poutine arrived from Canada (the OED is on shaky ground with “poutine”; their source is the Toronto Star but it was recorded in Canadian French years before that). A couple of NEW food-related words appeared though: microbrewery and turducken.
In other subjects, somehow English survived until 1982 without party animal. The word actually showed up in Saturday Night Live in 1978 (Bill Murray), but the OED first noticed it in print in ‘82.
Finally, 1982 was the year that England and Argentina actually went to war over the Falkland Islands (it didn’t any more sense then than it does now), and two words came out of that conflict, but disappeared almost immediately: yomp, meaning to march (it’s from the Royal Marines) and Argie, which is what the British tried to call the Argentinians, hoping it would annoy them. The British seem to always try to come up with insulting terms for armies they fight — that’s what Yankees and huns were supposed to be too. Now I wonder whether it backfires all the time, or just usually?
