A couple of thousand years ago — well, more than that really — the young people of Greece were notorious for wearing their hair quite long. There was even a Latin word for this: “acersecomes,” which simply meant “a long-haired youth.”
“Acersecomes” is Latin, but it comes from the Greek roots “kome” (hair, particularly the hair on your head) and “keirein” (to cut). “Kome” also turns up in the English words “comet” and “coma” (in the sense of the cloud of dust around a comet, not the medical condition) — the tail of a comet resembling long hair is the connection there. There wasn’t anything derogatory about “acersecomes;” it was just pretty common in ancient Greece and Rome for kids’ hair to remain uncut until they reached adulthood. It’s not from the lack of scissors, by the way. Those are older than you might think, and appeared in Mesopotamia as much as 4,000 years ago. In ancient Rome, they had plenty of scissors, and possibly even barbershops.
Anyway, the Latin word made the jump into English in the early 1600s as “acersecomic,” but there’s a bit of an oddity about it. The only records we have of “acersecomic” ever being actually used are in the 1623 “English Dictionary” written by Henry Cockeram, and the 1656 “Glossophraphia” dictionary written by Thomas Blount (one of the few dictionaries with a title you have to look up in a dictionary).
“Acersecomic” probably got into Blount’s dictionary because he copied it out of Cockeram’s earlier tome. But it’s a bit of a mystery where Cockeram found it, because nobody seems to have ever been able to find any other time the word appeared in print. Unless those dratted long-haired kids stole all the examples and used them to build a bonfire or something. Adults have been complaining about “kids today” for a long time; things like that are exactly why!
