This article explores the history and evolution of certain words that originated in the 1920s and are celebrating their 100th anniversary in 2025.
Brands are easier to pinpoint. Names such as Kleenex and Wurlitzer, trademarks filed on fixed dates, with no hint of either before 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. The first customer’s nose poked into a Kleenex in 1924, joining the global conversation a year on.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. 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
WORDS HISTORY TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE CULTURE
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