“Ramen” took off in popularity in the early 1980s.
While I was aware of “Cup Noodles” that certainly wouldn’t have been the generic name for ramen. The square packages were more popular in general, the cup version being used mainly for a quick lunch.
Speaking of food words, I’d put chipotle on the list.
I knew what “Ramen” was in the 1980s. I wouldn’t count it as “new since the year 2000”.
Good call. It’s new enough that there was a Jack in the Box commercial built around Jack’s difficulty pronouncing it… I still call it “chopatipple”.
Jihad?
Rosbif is french for roast beef.
That sounds about right to me, but I just wanted to address what I knew for certain, given my age (40). I was only barely in elementary school in the early 80s, but I remember my parents buying ramen in the late 80s/early 90s to keep around as a quick snack meal. The square packages are all we ever had around the house.
That sounds about right to me. I first learned of chipotle in about 1999/2000, while living overseas, when someone introduced me to Zarela Martinez’s Mexican cookbook. (She actually posted on this board a few times years back.) I had never heard of it at the time, but by the time I got back to the States in 2003, it was starting to explode in popularity, or had in the year or two prior.
And it’s a re-borrowing (French > English > French), since the English “roast” and “beef” come from Anglo-Norman French.
I thought of that earlier, but it’s definitely pre-2000. I was trying to think of some Arabic words that would have slipped into English after 9/11/01 and the only one I could come up with was “madrasa”, but I’m not sure that one qualifies either. Sharia [law]?
Per the OED:
Sharia is attested in English from 1855
Imam from 1613
Madrasa from 1616
Fatwa from 1625
Sunni and Shia both from from 1626 (and Sunna from 1687)
Eid from 1671
Hadith from 1817
Haj from 1847
Jihad from 1869
Once the British start writing about the Ottomans and their territories, you have terms relating to Islamic law and/or culture turning up in English (and I would guess in other European languages at about the same time). And once the British are running colonial possessions with significant Muslim populations (in India) you can pretty well open the throttle on the borrowing of such terms into English.
Oh you people and your highfalutin intellects! :smack:
What does that mean: “attested in English”?
Yeah, I went to Catholic high school in the late 80s/early 90s and pretty much all those words came up either in history or religion classes. I bet they’re more widely known now, but they certainly weren’t unknown then (though it helps that we did have probably about a 2-3% Muslim population in our high school. Yes, we had a reasonably non-Catholic minority in our Catholic High School, and it’s not a high school I would describe as liberal.)
It means the OED cites a text - a novel, a poem, a newspaper article, whatever - from that date which employs the term.
For example, the 1855 attestation that the OED offers for Sharia is a quote from Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah & Meccah, published in 1855, which reads thus:
“In fact, justice at El Medinah is administered in perfect conformity with the Shariat or Holy Law.”
The fact that the term’s meaning had to be explained tells me it’s not an English word. I know it’s a bit squishy, but I think a term borrowed from another language has to have wide understanding in the English speaking world for it to be considered an English word. Some explorer writes in a journal that the natives in a remote village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea call their huts “burundufalla” does not mean, to me, that “burundufalla” has entered the English language.
Sure. There are plenty of words in English which are unknown to you or me, simply because we have never encountered, and have no occasion to discuss, the concepts to which they refer, and yet those words may be commonplace for other speakers of English. There would be many speakers of English upon whose awareness Islam barely impinged until recent decades, and they might consider these words to be novelties, but in fact they have all been in the language for centuries, and anybody who has studied or read about comparative religion, or British India, or the Ottoman Empire, or a variety of other subjects, will have come across them…
My guess would be that most genuinely new additions to the language are going to be related to genuinely new concepts. If the concept has been around for a while then some speaker of English has been discussing it, even if not you or me, and the necessary vocabulary exists, waiting for us to find it when we need it.
Or, to put it simply, when you need or want to understand how turf is cut from a bog, you’ll discover the word “loy”.
The first occurrence of a loan-word in English is nearly always going to be an explanation of the word. And this is particularly true for the OED citations, since they are only interested in quotes in which the meaning of the word is explicit or implicit. (If you can’t tell from the quote what the word means, it’s not much use in a descriptive dictionary.)
If Burton used the word once in 1855, to add a bit of local colour to his narrative, and then it never occurred again, then I’d agree with you; that’s not really an English word. But in fact it occurs again with increasing frequency from 1855 onwards, used by other authors, and in time they it stop explaining it. So the Burton cite shows that the word is entering the language around 1855, and later cites show that it has entered the language. The fact that for quite a while it tends to be explained, at least when used in works intended for the general reader, tells us that it’s an obscure or technical word in English, but not that it’s not a word at all.
Early 90’s? Wow. I’m surprised it took off that early. Looks like late 90s/early 00s is when it made it to its relatively steady peak, which seems to coincide with my knowledge of the word. Jalapeno in the 80s makes sense to me, as I don’t really remember ever not knowing it, and I grew up in the 80s (turned 5 in 1980). Sriracha coming in as late as 2008 is surprising, too. I would’ve placed it five years earlier as when it started to enter the vocabulary. What I don’t understand is the big dip in popularity/Google ngrams of jalapeno starting in 1996.
The first Chipotle Mexican Grill was established in Denver in 1993. Its major expansion took place after 1998. I would think that many people first encountered the word in the name of the restaurant.
I think jalapenos were probably the first “specialty” chili pepper to gain wide popularity. Later on additional varieties like serranos and chipotles may have caught on and competed with them. Serrano has a similar curve to chipotle but began to rise a few years earlier.
As might be expected, jalapeno, chipotle, etc were current in the English used in the south-western US for quite a while before they achieved wider currency. There are plenty of cites from writing in or about Texas. Lady Bird Johnson mentions jalapenos in her White House Diaries. (Hash with jalapenos was apparently one of Lyndon’s favourite foods. She doesn’t feel she needs to tell her readers what a jalapeno is.) The diaries were published in 1970 but presumably written some years earlier. And for decades before that, the words were turning up in books about the food or the culture of the region. But you don’t find many cites not linked to Texas or Mexico for jalapeno until the mid-80s; for chipotle until the mid-90s.