oh my word!

e continually add words to our vocabularies, and sometimes barely notice it. Brexit, trolling, and coronavirus all came into widespread use in the past few years.

But what about words we happily accept as established parts of the language? Some are newer than you might think. “Sorry” for instance, first appeared in print in 1914, although was probably used in informal speech previously. “Toiletries” was coined in 1927, “robot” in 1923.

You can trace history through the dates when words enter the language. National Socialist, to refer to the German political party, was first seen in 1923, but no one in Britain used the term Nazi until 1930.

Nobody said “pence” in reference to old pennies. Pence, in its present form, sprang to life in 1971 when decimalisation came in. “Thatcherite”, for a supporter of Margaret Thatcher, is from 1976, but “Thatcherism”, a political doctrine, wasn’t used until 1979.

Products give us new terms. We started saying “Hoover” for vacuum cleaning in 1926; the potato “crisp” entered the language in 1929; “Polaroid” photos were first taken in 1961; “Y-fronts” have been making men look incredibly attractive since 1953.

I’m a “nutter” (1958) for this sort of thing. Let’s not have any “aggro” (1969) about it.

“Training shoe” was first used in 1973, but they didn’t become “trainers” until 1978. They were just gym shoes when I was at school. Serial murderers had been referred to since 1961, but “serial killers” didn’t appear until 1981. No one had an “IQ” until 1922. An “alien”, as a noun describing a being from another world, dates from 1953.

War throws up lots of new terms: Blitz (1940), Paratrooper (1941), Bazooka (1943), Kamikaze (1945). And, poignantly, “The Great War” only became “First World War” in 1939.

Ageism existed before 1969, but no one had heard the word. Skinheads were also invented in 1969, and scams started in 1963. No one had heard of a hula-hoop until 1958.

You’ll probably know the story of “hello”. The word was in use as far back as the 1830s, and was recommended as the telephone greeting by Thomas Edison in the 1870s.

His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, believed “ahoy” should be the answering word.

In support of our fellow Scotsman, I will henceforth use only “ahoy” to answer the phone.

Steve Finan in defence of the English language