On wordorigins.org, etymologist Dave Wilton is going through the Oxford English Dictionary year by year to find the earliest citations for various words, which offer an unusual linguistic glimpse into that particular year. The year 1937, for example, is the first in which we see the terms “four-by-four,” “cliffhanger,” and “iffy.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “1937’s Words”
After all these years, one of my favorite sites on the internet is wordorigins.org.
Oh yeah, Dave Wilton’s site.
Right, Dave runs his site.
He’s, I think he’s a scientist actually and a technologist.
He’s very academically oriented.
And his side passion is language.
He’s written a couple books.
But he’s been up to something recently that’s really excited me.
He’s gone through the Oxford English Dictionary and said, for any given year, what are the words that first appear in that year?
So for 1937, for example, four by four, as in the vehicles, four wheel drive vehicles.
Yeah. Cliffhanger, you know, suspenseful movie or episode, actually, of a television show or a serial.
Right. Yeah. I love that idea. And iffy.
Iffy, he says, was popularized by Franklin Roosevelt, who loved the term.
So he’s got this list of these words from 1937.
And in this list, we have a picture of a year.
Yeah.
You have all these things come to mind.
We think of FDR now, and there’s some stuff related to the Nazis,
And there’s stuff related to automobiles.
And you can just kind of imagine what was in the lingua franca of the year.
I’ll share a few more of these later.
But I just love this list.
That’s Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org.
877-929-9673 is the number to call,
Or send email to words@waywordradio.org.
Thank you.
