This hashtag or that hashtag is trending on Twitter. This hot model from Ypsilanti is trending on Instagram. Trump’s latest chicanery is trending on Google.
Is this usage an internet thing? Or does it predate the 'net?
The word “trending” was found before 1800, and seems to peak at 1980, in books, according to Google ngram. I expect the usage profile may be different for other media, but the point is that if the word “trending” was used, that means “trend” was understood to be usable as a verb.
Most of the uses of “trending” back then seem to be a particular term in geology.
“Trending” wasn’t common parlance in the 80s, and it didn’t mean what it means now. It used to mean “Starting a trend, or fashion.” Farrah Fawcett’s hair trended in the 70s, meaning, everyone copied it. But the poster of her in the red bathing suit wouldn’t have been described as “trending,” meaning “was popular in that everyone was sharing the original.” But now, you could say that “Back in the 70s, the poster trended.” If you’d said the poster “trended” in 1976, it would have meant that a lot of women were taking picture of themselves in that pose in a bathing suit, and having them made into pin-ups.
Again, I don’t recall the word getting tossed around like candy, the way it does now.
True. If you narrow the search to use of “is trending” though, you find some non-geological uses that sound modern, like “Approximately 95 percent of the Burley crop is consumed domestically and consumption is trending upward.” All that’s new these days is dropping the “upward”.
Here’s an interesting usage from 1903 “Just now the general opinion is trending to the belief that any one of these conditions may prevail” (which sounds like it’s using the geological term metaphorically).
Trend as a verb, comes to us from Old English, via Middle English. The OED has cites from c.1000. In other words, since the English language emerged, there has never been a time when it wasn’t a verb. (As a noun, it’s comparatively modern; no cites from before 1640.)
Its meaning has evolved over time, though. Originally it meant to turn around, revolve, roll over. Then it acquired the meaning of turning something over, or turning something around, and the figurative meaning of considering or reflecting on something (turning it over in one’s mind). By about the sixteenth century it acquired a geographical or spatial sense - to travel around or along the edge of a region; to skirt; to go around. In the seventeenth century, instead of talking about rounding the cape, a sailor might talk about trending the cape. From this it acquired a looser sense of choosing or taking a particular direction or course, even it it wasn’t around something else; after securing additional supplies, the expedition continued to trend northwards. And that, in time, could be used in non-geographical senses - consumption of beef trended upwards during the nineteenth century; the discussion trended away from theology in the direction of politics. And this is what we get the current sense from.
The specific sense of generating a large amount of social media activity over a short time span cannot, of course, predate the emergence of social media. The OED has cites for this sense from 2007.
To me, “becoming more popular” and “trending on Twitter” are such closely related meanings as to be nearly indistinguishable. It’s like saying the meaning of the word “typing” has changed because we used to do it on typewriters and now we do it on electronic keyboards.
Or, am I missing something? It wouldn’t be the first time.
It used to mean “Starting a fad,” as opposed to “Experiencing it becoming the fad itself.”
Skateboarding was trending in the 70s, in that everyone was learning to do it for themselves. NOW, a video of a dog on a skateboard trends, as everyone has to watch the YouTube video of the French bulldog on the skateboard.
The question is when “trending” started to mean “becoming more popular”. Since at least the nineteenth century we could talk about, e.g., beef consumption trending upwards, but we could equally talk about it trending downwards; there was nothing about “trend” that implied a trend towards popularity.
But we’ve had “trendy”, meaning fashionable, current, popular since the 1960s, so I’d say that since then “trend”, meaning to move or tend in a particular direction has, in the absence of a context suggesting otherwise, defaulted to suggesting a trend towards popularity or fashionableness.
To answer the OP: Yes, it existed waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy before the internet.