LARP, queer studies, and mixed martial arts? That's a party I'd like to go to
Me: hey wife, I was born the same year queso became a word, look
My wife: ay, dios mio
Some important words from The Year of Alex:
big-box, bodycon, chemtrail, chyron, clap back, gift card, hoodie, malware, McMansion, queer studies, shout-out, spam, tighty whities, twentysomething, two-factor identification, World Wide Web
and of course
transmissible spongiform encephalopathy
YO. im aromantic, and the word was first used in my birth year! god damn...
Air Guitar, BIOS, Bitmap, dunk on, differently abled, graphics tablet (that long ago??? I thought that didn't exist until this century!!!), gridlock (really??? That's not older?), baby bump, chill out
A lot of terms that seem like they've been in use forever were born in 1980! And a lot of terms I thought were a lot younger, too! Air guitar, BIOS, Bitmap, and chill out are literally the only ones I listed here that don't surprise me. (A bunch of medical terms, too. Check out 1980, there're several pages of new words in it.)
Computer mouse and tablets were invented pretty close to each other if i remember correctly.
Of course it wasn't correct. I kinda filed tablets and light pens in the same brain drawer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen
some highlights:
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
gender nonconforming
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor
wake and bake
lolololol it would be hilarious if i was an unfocused depressed enby pothead but i'm only some of those things
I'm the same age as bi-curious, moonwalk (in the dance sense), search engine, earbud, and horndog
(Also don't exactly trust MW's sources because it says "Chilean sea bass" for my birth year but outside sources set the Patagonian toothfish's marketing glow-up 7 years before I was born)
There's always a lag between when a word starts climbing from obscurity into common usage and when dictionaries add it; M-W, being a dictionary, tracks the latter.
But the date is supposed to be the first known appearance in print, not when it first appeared in the dictionary
not gonna reverse it on MW but google books has the first occurrences in 1992 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=chilean+sea+bass&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
Yeah further reading up and all the the references I could find to the 1977 date trace back to one article and it's in reference to a particular fish wholesaler using the term then, so may be something used internally or in-person in sales meetings back then and the fish only later really started actively being marketed under that name, which likely explains the delay in print attestation...
Yeah, pretty much. Sriracha and tres leches cake both showed up for me...
