1914 was a remarkable year. Although World War I began then, which is notable but really can’t be considered a credit to its time, 1914 also saw the introduction of the first commercial airplane passenger service in the world — between Tampa and St. Petersburg, Florida. That doesn’t sound like much today, particularly since those cities are only 23 miles apart, but if you think about actually paying for a 23-mile ride in a seaplane in 1914, it’s pretty impressive. Not to mention terrifying.
The main things we should remember 1914 for, though, are the words that entered the language that year. One of them was “gunite.” That’s both a material and a process; it consists of spraying a concrete mixture onto a structure reinforced with a mesh of steel bars. It’s sprayed by compressed air, through a sort of gun (hence “gunite”), and it’s still used today, particularly for swimming pools.
Now, let’s say you’re a wealthy homeowner in 1914 and you’ve decided to have a swimming pool installed with this new process. You might be standing proudly nearby as the construction crew works on your new pool, and then your neighbor — who everybody knows as “the cat lady” — rushes over, quite in a tizzy. You wouldn’t have identified her agitated state as a “tizzy,” though, because although “tizzy” first entered the language about a century earlier, it didn’t mean “a state of nervous excitement” for another twenty years. But never mind that. The cat lady comes to you and anxiously asks what kind of fence or wall you’re going to put around the pool because “ailurophiles like herself were ever so distraught about the dangers of such an open body of water.”
Any ordinary 1914 citizen in that circumstance would naturally have replied something like “um, what?” You, however, are no ordinary 1914 citizen — you’re on the cutting edge of all the new developments in the rapidly changing world. You’ve even booked a compartment on the train to Tampa just so you can try out that new-fangled aeroplane service they have down there.
More to the point, you are not only familiar with “gunite,” you also know that “ailurophile” is another word just introduced to English that very year. It means “lover of cats”, and it was coined in an article in the American Journal of Psychology. You recall being puzzled about why the author based his newly coined word on an ancient Greek word for cat (aílouros) instead of the more common Latin (fēlīnus).
While skimming the rest of the journal — no other new words were introduced, so it wasn’t worth the time to read, you would have reflected on the fact that although you’re no fan of cats, you oughtn’t succumb to ailurophobia, living as you do next door to the cat lady.
So, not wanting to be a loudmouth pitchman, but also striving to appear ultrareliable (while not bordering on sociopathic), you assure the cat lady that your pool will be protected by the latest of fencing doohickeys. As an extra gesture, knowing she’s a filmgoer, you invite her to the movies. She’s mollified, and you bask in the satisfaction of seeing six more 1914 words used in a this very paragraph.
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