// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did the recency illusion say? I'm a recent development.
The recency illusion is the belief or impression, on the part of someone who has only recently become aware of a long-established phenomenon, that the phenomenon itself must be of recent origin. The term was coined by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University who is primarily interested in examples involving words, meanings, phrases, and grammatical constructions.[1] However, use of the term is not restricted to linguistic phenomena: Zwicky has defined it simply as, "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent".[2]
According to Zwicky, the illusion is caused by selective attention.[2]
Examples
[edit]The use of they, them, or their to reference a singular antecedent without specific gender, as in "If George or Sally come by, give them the package", is known as the singular they. Although this usage is often cited as a modern invention,[3] it is quite old,[4][a] and has been in regular use in formal contexts as far back as the 14th century.[5][6]
Other examples include doable from Middle English, legit from the 1890s, and high in the sense of 'intoxicated' from the 1920s.[7][8][9] The use of OMG, an abbreviation for oh my God, was first recorded in 1917 in a letter to Winston Churchill.[10]
The Tiffany problem is the phenomenon that names like Tiffany may appear anachronistic in historical fiction, despite being historically attested, due to their modern usage.
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ↑ Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage noted, "Although the lack of a common-gender third person pronoun has received much attention in recent years from those concerned with women's issues, the problem, as felt by writers, is much older" (1989, page 901).
References
[edit]- ↑ Rickford, John R.; Wasow, Thomas; Zwicky, Arnold (2007). "Intensive and quotative all: something new, something old". American Speech. 82 (1): 3–31. doi:10.1215/00031283-2007-001.
- 1 2 Zwicky, Arnold (7 August 2005). "Just between Dr. Language and I". Language Log. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
- ↑ Mora, Celeste (May 12, 2020). "What Is the Singular They, and Why Should I Use It?". Grammarly blog. Grammarly. Retrieved July 9, 2021.
Admittedly, using the singular they in a formal context may still cause some raised eyebrows, so be careful if you're submitting a paper to a particularly traditional teacher or professor. But the tides are turning, and English will soon be more efficient
- ↑ Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Merriam Webster. 1989. ISBN 978-0-87779-132-4.
- ↑ The American Heritage Book of English Usage: A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 1996. ISBN 978-0-547-56321-3.
- ↑ Pullum, Geoffrey (13 April 2012). "Sweden's gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun". Archived from the original on 8 May 2016. Retrieved 28 March 2023.
[...] our pronoun they was originally borrowed into English from the Scandinavian language family [...] and since then has been doing useful service in English as the morphosyntactically plural but singular-antecedent-permitting gender-neutral pronoun known to linguists as singular they
- ↑ Shariatmadari, David (2014-07-01). "11 words that are much older than you think". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2026-03-28.
- ↑ Oxford English Dictionary, “doable (adj. & n.),” March 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1072394857.
- ↑ Oxford English Dictionary, “legit (n.2, adj., & adv.),” September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7965676439.
- ↑ N; P; R (2017-09-09). "'OMG' Turns 100". NPR. Retrieved 2026-03-28.
Further reading
[edit]- Zwicky, Arnold (17 November 2007). "The word: Recency illusion". New Scientist. 196 (2630): 60. doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(07)62923-6.