Brands are easier to pinpoint. Names like Kleenex and Wurlitzer, trademarks filed on fixed dates, with no hint of either prior to arrival. Better than that, both products proved endearing, one serving our nasal organ, the other an organ serving the cinema. Over time, those capital letters fluctuated as both brands flirted with word-hood later in the century.
I wish it was all so simple, collecting each word turning 100 in 2025. Truth be told, even Kleenex and Wurlitzer had false starts and regional launches, blunting the precision. Rudolph Wurlitzer, a German expat in Cincinnati, toyed with acoustic pianos long before his company’s bells-and-whistles darling bobbed up in the dress circle. While the first customer’s nose poked into a Kleenex in 1924, joining the global conversation a year on.
Hip hip hooray!
Zipper is an equivalent mess. Whitcomb Judson conceived the sliding fastener in the 1890s, the gadget needing decades to streamline. By 1925 in fact, boosted by sealable mailbags and Goodrich galoshes, the name was a word, soon to morph into zip, the verb included.
Away from patents, the exactitude only loosens. The moment I declare surrealism is 100 in the year coming, some art historian will exhume an earlier Magritte of a chocolate unicycle, from 1923 say, demanding to know how else the image could be classified? Slumber party is another alleged centenarian. Happy birthday, I say. Knowing this risks an irate email, sent by the great-grandson of Helen Kafoops who had her entire Girl Guide pack sleep over to celebrate Armistice Day.
Scientists sprang into action in 1925, excelling in the coinage game, from lipid to cosmic rays – plus G, the gravitational force. Microclimate was another early hatching. So too smog, just as recycling (1926) and greenhouse effect (1929) loomed around the corner. You see a similar parabola in rocket-ship (1925), the Jules Verne vehicle suddenly tangible, giving rise to science fiction (1927), astronaut (1928) and spacesuit (1929).
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Cozzie and cuppa are also clocking 100 years in 2025, proving the vernacular was also restless. Bitchy and twerp appeared too. Sexy and hot (as in stolen). Motel and guesstimate. Cliched and kitsch. Blind date and buy – as in to believe. Amazing to think, but in 1920, had you said the toffee-nosed newsreader loves to eat chewy zucchini, your audience wouldn’t know where to begin, since your four key terms were each five years from lobbing.
Chewy, you ask. Zucchini? I know. Some of these centenarians seem implausible, along with equalise and lesbian. Groceries alone feel timeless, making you wonder what else did we call Chinese gooseberries (another 1925 alumnus) before it was a Chinese gooseberry? The question exposes the Western bias of so many listed words, as zucchini grew in Mexico before Montezuma was in rompers, just as mihoutao (literally “macaque fruit”) were savoured by emperors of the Song dynasty, a millennium before Chinese gooseberry hit the shelves.
We lost the likes of hincty (snobby) and flatlet, usherette and bung-ho (a supposed exclamation)
Sheik illustrates the point best. As old as time, this Arabic word for chief kept unheard by infidel ears for centuries. But throw Rudolf Valentino into a dishdasha, and bung him on the silver screen with a Wurlitzer swirl, and soon the word is officially real.
Not that every coinage however survived the interim. We lost the likes of hincty (snobby) and flatlet, usherette and bung-ho (a supposed exclamation), while barely retaining banjolele and travel agent. What say we hit the rest home (another 1925 baby) and throw a kitsch slumber party to celebrate?
