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The OED has just made it possible for us to ask, "What words were invented in the year I was born?", though another question lies behind that one: "When did words start being fun?"
The OED was founded on the principle that the history of English from Anglo-Saxon times through to the present day could be charted on its pages. Both a word's earliest recorded appearance and its changes were logged by the dictionary's editors and contributors. I say logged, but in truth it was, to start off with, pigeonholed, in an ever-expanding filing system at the University Press in Oxford.
The subject of our history being charted in the words we use was perhaps invented by Owen Barfield with his book History in English Words (1926). What must have taken him days of research through the OED now takes no more than a couple of seconds.
Change in language is hard to capture and when it's visible or audible; it is also hard for some to accept. There may have been many reasons to have called Shakespeare an "upstart crow" – one of them may have been that he was an oik who took it upon himself to invent words. By the way, I note that my computer thinks that "oik" is not a word.
I quickly flicked to the 1940s and 50s on the OED site to see which words came in during my first years of existence. The 1940s gave us "technophobe", "arty-farty" and "bake-off". The 1950s gave us "brainwash", "hands-free", "decaf" and "Eurovision".
When faced with these new arrivals, we feel entitled to call them symptoms of an era but on occasions we get tempted to inflate that to explanations. So, "brainwash" was indeed a word doing the rounds in the 1950s because that's what the enemy did; they got hold of our chaps and turned them into commies.
Once you've got a word for something, you can use it again and again in an ever-widening circle. Radio, television, comics, teachers, rock music, religious cults could all be accused of "brainwashing". But it does more than that: it gives a shape to a process that we then might easily take for granted: can brains be "washed"? And if a person comes to believe something, is it because it's been "washed"? In other words, the active participation of the victim's brain is eliminated from what's going on.
The converse of new words coming in, is the fading away of others. The words with the shortest lives seem to be youth slang. Anyone recording me in the 1950s would have heard me saying that things I was enthusiastic about were "trick good" or "dead lush". "Trick" was probably a compression of "terrifically". "Lush" from "luscious" is still doing its work in the West Country. A decade later, the combined effect of jazz, rock and hippie talk would have us calling each other "man", going round to each other's "pads", earning "bread", you "dig"? The arrival of the Beatles had some of us saying that things were "gear", "grotty", "groovy", "trendy" and "fab". One or two of these have survived – why some rather than others? For some reason, fab is less naff than groovy or, indeed, naff.
English is of course a world language and there are at least two ways this has a bearing: Anglophones mix with the US acting as the most influential, but with Australia and Jamaica doing well with "dobbing in" and "who dat?". On the other hand, English is in constant contact with hundreds of other languages. It might be false to talk of languages as if they are banks, borrowing and lending words. Even so, once upon a time, people in Britain didn't talk of "schadenfreude" and now football commentators notice we fans do a lot of it. The other day I spotted myself saying that I really like "sag". A few years ago, I'm sure I would have said "the spinach you get in Indian restaurants".
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