An interesting (new?) feature of the OED I recently stumbled upon. Enter your birth year, and it'll tell you the word that arrived along with you. It seems to only provide a single word ... maybe the first for the year or the most cited. Not sure. But still a fun discovery. Try it at the link below:
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/12/oed-birthday-words/
Well, well. My birthday word is 'artificial intelligence' and that is the field in which I work. An anno-aptonym?
Now we know your age (within a reasonable margin of error)! None of these is my birthday word, but browsing through I was quite surprised to see frenemy listed for 1953's birthday word, between noshery and nowheresville. What an interesting find.
Glenn said
Now we know your age (within a reasonable margin of error)!
Yes, less than 2% error.
EmmettRedd said: An anno-aptonym?
Maybe "anno-aptonym" should be in the OED too. Weird, but my birthday word was "blast-off" and if you've ever clicked on the Heimhenge link you've seen what I do these days. Been into astronomy since, around age 6-7, when my uncle showed me the Moon through a telescope he built.
Then again, maybe not so weird ... lots of people who grew up during the cold war space race ended up in some STEM career. My uncle ended up working in the computer industry, and I ended up as a science teacher. In a way, that OED feature tracks trends in society by adopting words that emerged in response to societal changes. I found it strange that "acronym" surfaced in the 40s ... thought that word was a LOT older, but it probably owes its origin to the prolific use of acronyms by the military, which had just wrapped up WWII in that decade.