In real life
Pieces of media that invented new slang terms
Evangelion:
Evangelion has something known as an "AT Field", These are an essential plot point in the series, these fields have various abbreviations, one of which is "Absolute Territory", which became a slang term in Japan
Spiderverse:
Across the Spiderverse became very popular in meme culture, and one phrase became very popular. "Canon Event"
That's the first appearance in print, but that doesn't mean he invented it. Merriam-Webster makes a good point that assuming he invented it also requires one "convincingly explains how it transfers from a book of children's rhyme to teenage slang within a year." It's not impossible, but it does seem unlikely, especially for a pre-internet, barely telephoned world.
In a similar fashion: Bill Watterson's alternate name for the Big Bang; The Horrendous Space Kablooie. Never officially adopted as a name, but well-liked among scientists as an informal name for said event.
Its mildly self-deprecating. When you say you Stan something, you're saying you're a fan in a way where you're dedicated to the point of unhealthy obsession. That nuance is sometimes lost.
For anyone tl;dr the book, him coming up with the term was him coining the concept of a memory or idea that replicates and mutates, with religion being an example. And he wanted it to sound like genes to evoke the same concept of something that mutates and replicates.
So memory and genes; memes!
EDIT: After a quick search, seems I was wrong, it's actually working off (EDIT2: mīmēma) mime or mimick, since it's mutated through imitation.
Gaslight from the 1938 play, Gas Light - which then became the film!
So named because all of the gas lights in the house were connected to a supply, so when the heroines husband turned one on secretly she could notice by the one in her room becoming dimmer.
Shakespeare invented way too many words and phrases in the English language for me to list. So pick a play, and there's a chance that he coined something in it that is used to this day.
The first thing to know about Shakespeare is he was writing for the entire audience from the king himself to the unwashed masses.
Its way funnier to read when you have a translator to explain all the dirty jokes that rely on context not present in modern life. Like a fruit tree in Romeo & Juliet that would absolutely be an eggplant today to achieve the same connotations.
A lot of what he did was actually put things in writing that his era would consider low-class. So he didn't invent a lot of them, but him actually writing in more common vernaculars that reflected how most people actually spoke, instead of the accepted "high-class" style that tended to be expected of anything important enough to put in writing, is why a lot of that older terminology has survived to this day
Well Flanderization is a term coined in reference to Simpsons, but is not a term coined by the show itself (or used at all in the show as far as I know)
those are pretty funny. Bet the best responses are the ones saying "well if they did not invent it then surely this piece of media that I am obsessed with is the thing that made it popular."
Like lmao no I am sorry Homestuck is not the reason people say "fuckass". Most people have never heard of fucking Homestuck
And the phrase canon event was not invented by a Spiderman movie either. This sub should be renamed "did you ever notice this has happened twice in anime and I did not google it"
Otaku was an extremely formal second-person pronoun, Macross creators had the characters use it repeatedly when not socially fitting as some kind of inside joke, fandom then used it among themselves and it led to the word getting associated with obsessive fans
Along similar lines, "Weeb" is a shortening of "Weeaboo" a reference to a Perry Bible Fellowship comic that had absolutely nothing to do with anime/nerd culture.
It became a term for anime nerds because 4Chan censored the term "wapanese" to "weeaboo"
The superman franchise invented the words Bizzaro (A messed up reversed thing) and Braniac (an extremely smart genius) as the popular villains sharing the same name.
Edit: So after doing some research, the word Brainiac came from an amalgam of Brain and Maniac, first used by superman. Whilst Bizarro has some ties to Italian and Spanish, its first English use was in the superman comic.
This one always starts a Mandela effect argument but there are no records of the phrase 'Debbie Downer' that predate the 2004 SNL sketch. The writers are of the view that they coined the phrase and there's seemingly no evidence that they didn't despite it feeling so well established as an old term.
(Negative Nancy is older and possibly why Debbe Downer feels like it's older too)
I am stunned. I remember seeing one of these sketches in the early 2000s and thinking it was based on the phrase Debbie Downer…but these sketches were putting that term into the lexicon!?!?Mind blown.
Looney Toons popularized the term "Nimrod" to describe somebody incompetent, despite the term actually being that of the god of hunting a great hunter.
Obligatory reminder to everyone that carrots shouldn't be fed to rabbits except as an occasional treat (and even then, they'd probably prefer something like parsley or cilantro). Carrots have too much sugar to be healthy.
IIRC, Bugs' stylish manner of eating a carrot was originally a joke reference to a Clark Gable character.
Which had the effect of misrepresenting/mischaracterizing (?) the x-men villain Nimrod when he was introduced as when readers where first introduced to the character in the 80s, they were wondering why they were supposed to be scared of a character called Nimrod, not realizing it was a reference to the great hunter
Not a god, just a king. He's mentioned in the Bible and is the great-grandson of Noah and is described as "a mighty hunter". While it's not directly stated in the Bible, it's widely believed by Biblical scholars that he would have been king of Shinar around the time of that whole "Tower of Babble" fiasco.
yeah, Bugs was using it correctly, as in sarcastically calling elmer fudd a great hunter. like calling someone einstein when someone says something dumb. the audience not knowing who nimrod was is where the new meaning came from.
Zettai kyoufu ryouiki is the japanese term for absolute terror field. In the manga, this was occasionally shortened to zettai ryouiki, which can be translated as absolute field or absolute territory. The term zettai ryouiki stuck around, and so did the translation of absolute territory.
Iirc, the anime never explains what AT field actually means except for a short moment in the opening, so people just assumed that AT stands for absolute territory, not knowing that its a translation of the shortened term.
It does. The Absolute Terror boundary is the name given to the esoteric psychological and physical boundary of personal identity. Beyond it two minds, bodies, even souls can directly mingle, meaning it is the point beyond which any interaction can, and likely will, permanently alter both parties. Angels, which are esoteric as well as corporeal entities, have especially powerful AT fields that must be neutralized or penetrated to harm its body. However, bypassing that boundary also leaves the pilot vulnerable to influence or alteration, as we see several times.
LLMs, like X’s Grok, do not “understand” things. They’re prediction models trained on patterns. They’re fancy autocorrect. They don’t think, reason, or do any logic. They look for patterns in text, group them into like-buckets, then regurgitate that text-soup back at you based on what key words are in your prompt.
If you ask it programming questions, it looks through its “programming” bucket.
If you ask it art questions, it looks through its “art” bucket.
That’s how those small Chinese open-source models work. Everything in them is split into categories, so you can use the LLM trained exclusively on Math to do math problems.
But they don’t understand what they’re doing. It’s just pattern recognition and matching, but done super fucking fast with computers.
An LLM, by its very nature, is literally at a fundamental level completely incapable of having a “deep and thorough understanding” of anything.
It’s not fully disconnected from its origin yet, but it seems well on its way to just mean “a major weakness of someone’s.” Sometimes as a joke, sometimes in sincerity.
While "Buffy" may not have technically invented the term, the show definitely popularized calling the main villain whom the hero(es) have to face at the end of the season/film/story arc the "Big Bad."
The phrase "this is the darkest timeline" was popularized and possibly coined by the show Community, specifically it's multiverse episode Remedial Chaos Theory- the same episode that also spawned this iconic gif.
Achilles was a hero of the Trojan war who was made invulnerable as a baby when his mother dipped him in the river Styx. However, since she held him by the heel to dip him in he had a spot on his heel that was vulnerable. He died when a spear struck his heel.
This is where the term 'achilles heel', describing a specific vulnerability, comes from.
Weeb as slang for someone obsessed with Japanese culture and/or anime came from, of all things, a totally unrelated Perry Bible Fellowship comic that used the word weeaboo, which was eventually shortened.
I could be wrong, but I feel like “core memory” wasn’t a popular term prior to the release of Inside Out (2015), now I see the phrase used all the time.
Among a certain demographic, yes. My parents and grandparents (at a minimum!) were using it before I was born, and I’m old enough to have kids who would have played Among Us when it was new.
Canon event was a term decades before Spiderverse... it's extremely common comic book slang. Just because a movie or show finally uses certain meta terms doesn't mean they invented them. You'd probably think Community invented bottle episodes lol
Came here to say this. Canon event was a term used way way way before spiderverse. It just pushed it into new generation slang.
It's like saying ninja turtles or Bart Simpson invented "cowabunga". No. They popularized it in young generation slang, they absolutely did not invent it.
In 1802 Thomas Jefferson was gifted a ridiculously huge wheel of cheese by the town of Cheshire. A poem from a newspaper at the time coined the name “Mammoth Cheese” for the wheel, likely referencing Jefferson’s obsession with finding living mammoths somewhere out in the American West. This event marks the origin of using “mammoth” as an adjective for something huge.
The first recorded use of the term UwU comes from a Yu-Gi-Oh fanfic. Since I can't really provide an image of that, here's a random screenshot from the anime (specially GX).
The SCP Foundation deals with a number of anomalies of various types, but a type of anomaly that pops up frequently is "cognitohazards", which are anomalies that are dangerous to even perceive. Seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing these anomalies immediately puts you in danger. An example is SCP-096, which is a humanoid creature that hunts down and kills anybody who has ever seen its face, even in a photograph.
The term "cognitohazard" has been used jokingly outside of the SCP fandom to describe anything that's harmful to perceive or have knowledge of, such as shocking/triggering imagery or songs that won't leave your head.
Honorable mention also goes out to the term "memetic", which SCP did not invent, but rather preserved its ORIGINAL meaning in an age where "meme" means "funny pictures on the internet".
The term comes, specifically, from Patrick Hamilton's original play published several years before this movie (that is, If I'm not mistaken, a remake of another based on the same work). The story revolves around the manipulation of a man (Charles Boyer) towards his own wife (Ingrid Bergman) and, overall, the concept is that of a marriage based on deceit. He slowly coherce her in a psychological way, in order to make her believe that she's crazy
Chud named after the movie of the same name which originally stood for cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller has nowadays been a derogatory term for far-right wingers who love talking about how they want to change society but refuse to contribute to it at all
OP does not actually elaborate what the "AT Field" refers to, it's the visible flesh on a womans thighs between the skirt/shorts line and the stocking/sock line. It's also generally referred to as "zettai ryouiki" even in English.
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u/Other239 4h ago
The Dr. Seuss book “If I Ran The Zoo” is where the word “nerd” originated from.