Nineteen fifty-four, the year of my birth,* witnessed Brown v. Board of Education, Elvis Presley’s first successful song, mass testing of the Salk polio vaccine, Hank Aaron’s first major league baseball game, and the coining of the word nowheresville. That last is according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s new Birthday Word Generator, linked to the date when OED researchers have been able to locate the first usage of a term. My sister’s word is oenophilic, which I would have thought went back a few more years or centuries; my husband’s word is gobbledygook.
I recently witnessed Laura Poitras’s new installation at the Whitney Museum in New York, which among other things features a video of a detainee at Abu Ghraib being interrogated. One of the first things the off-camera American asks him is the year of his birth. There’s something terribly poignant for me in his answer: “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how old you are?” the interrogator presses. The suspect shrugs and says simply, “No.”
Those of us who do know tend to fetishize our birth year, even our birth month and day. Astrology’s never done anything for me, but language casts a very different spell. Though Samuel Butler published the first novel about nowheresville, Erewhon, in 1872, I would have guessed the term’s origin later, somewhere between the flight from Western norms that took place in the late 1960s and the renewed drive for material success toward the end of the century. Nowheresville is both the place you escape to and the dead end of the road. I don’t mind sharing its birth year.
Jackalope as trophy
I can’t resist searching for others. My older son’s word is bazillionaire, perhaps a fitting bookend to nowheresville. What’s strange about this dating is that the root, bazillion, goes back to 1939, apparently predating zillion. That can’t be right, I think. And perhaps my getting this far in the birthday word game suggests the OED’s ulterior motive in creating the Birthday Word Generator. “The OED team is continuously researching the histories of words,” they tell us on the website, along with a link to OED appeals, a web page with terms the team needs help with. Though the jackalope, for instance, is currently dated to the early 1950s, the editors have reason to believe a Wyoming taxidermist created the first one perhaps 20 years earlier, and they’re seeking some verifiable evidence. Paranormal had the OED editors stumped, but readers are weighing in, mostly with texts from 1905. Apparently not persuasively enough, though: The birthday word for 1905 remains hands-on.
Obviously, that’s not the only term that originated in 1905, so the editors are doing some selection. To find my very own day-of-birth word, I had to use their Advanced Word Search guide, which led me to a word that was two days old by the time I entered the world: narco.
Well, that’s so very me, I thought: a narco from nowheresville. Thanks, guys.
Still, the old behemoth is up to some fun tricks these days. Sniffing around birthday words, I even ran into the OED’s Timeline Challenge, where you try to guess when a word like thinker or movie entered the language. (I got 4 out of 5 on my first round, 1 out of 5 on my second round.)
Still, nothing beats your own personal birthday word. Unlike astrological signs, you cannot try to time your next child’s birth to coincide with a word; after all, we don’t know what words are coming at us in the future. The closest the OED is willing to approach our own time is with your 12-year-old’s 2004 word, podcast. Give it to her on a birthday card. Tell her to treasure it, a word as young and bright as she is.
*I have never understood the tendency among both men and women to fudge one’s age. I think I look good for 62. For 54, not so much.