The Interesting Literary Origins of ‘Selfie’, ‘Unfriended’, ‘Twerk’, and Other Modern Words

The true origins of some modern additions to the Oxford English Dictionary and other ‘new’ words

This post is a sort of sequel to our earlier post, about 10 seemingly modern words which actually have older, literary connections. In that post, we cast an eye over words such as ’email’ (actually found in print in the sixteenth century – with a different meaning, obviously!), ‘Google’ (found in 1907), ‘muggle’ (the thirteenth century), and others. Now, we’re looking at other modern words that aren’t so modern – even if they once had very different meanings from the ones we now associate with them.

Read more