TIME CAPSULE
1964: Condo, quasar and pantsuit; plus Mary Poppins alights
Social justice in the U.S. advances when President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law. Students protest escalation of the Vietnam War. The U.S. surgeon general’s report links smoking to lung cancer. Ford Motor Co. unveils the Mustang muscle car at the New York World’s Fair. Jeopardy!, Bewitched and the stop-motion special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer air on network TV. We finally meet the Beatles. And these words and phrases get a spot in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.
BASIC: Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code gives students a language to create simple computer programs.
BLACK HOLE: A celestial object, like a dying star, middle top, wi th a gravitational field so strong that light cannot get out.
BRADFORD PEAR: Praised as nearly “ideal” ornamentals when the USDA introduces them, these trees are later shunned for their habit of hybridizing with natives.
CONDO: The first modern condominium goes up in Utah in 1960; by ’64 the term for a housing unit owned from the walls in is shortened to its simpler form.
DWEEB: College slang for a person who’s completely unappealing or inept.
FOLKIE: Another name for folk singer or musician, as the likes of Joan Baez, middle right, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger bring the word to the fore.
NEW MATH: A 1960s education reform that teaches kids to think abstractly about math concepts and principles.
OP ART: Art based on optical illusions, such as hypnotic geometric lines, right. Time magazine calls it “pictures that attack the eye.”
PANTSUIT: Rebellious women leave their skirts at home and head to the office wearing a new kind of outfit: a jacket with matching pants.
QUARK: These elementary particles of matter that are smaller than protons and neutrons get their name from a word coined by James Joyce.
QUASAR: The shortened version of Quasi-Stellar Radio Source, this is how scientists describe their discovery of a bright region at the center of a galaxy that produces an extremely large amount of energy.
RAT FINK: Cartoonist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth creates a crazed satiric character called Rat Fink in ’63, and its meaning of contemptible person follows soon after.
STREAKING: Using chemicals—like hydrogen peroxide—to lighten streaks of hair is a big trend. But by the mid-’70s ladies are highlighting (not streaking).
TOE LOOP: Skaters before Thomas Litz perform this toe-pick assisted jump, the easiest one in figure skating, but it’s the triple he lands in the ’64 World Championships that people remember.
ZIP CODE: In ’63 the U.S. Postal Service debuts the 5-digit Zone Improvement Plan to make mail sorting more efficient; it’s fully in place by the next year.