Seinfeld once said he was very proud to introduce people to the concept of “shirinkage.”
Going back a bit, didn’t Fonzie (Happy Days) give us “nerd”?
No. Happy Days was shown in the 1970’s and it was set in the 1950’s, when “nerd” was being used. To have introduced it into a show about the 1950’s , unless it was being used in that decade, would be just wrong.
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No. Nerd was around long before Happy Days. In fact it was around at the time of Happy Days (i.e. the 50s).
The words I always think about The Sopranos introducing me to are mongrel Italian like gobbagool and madon’. Oh, and of course porca miseria and guaglione.
D’oh!
But didn’t it re-introduce it back into popular culture?
“venus butterfly”
“Dingbat” already existed as a non-alpha-numeric-or-punctuation character, but did its meaning of “dummy” precede All in the Family? And how about “meathead”?
That’s what I was going to say. My brother got me this for Christmas.
That didn’t originate from Seinfeld, Seinfeld used an existing idiom.
Shiny!
And to a lesser extent, 'verse.
If it weren’t for sitcom commercials, I doubt anyone would know what either “zany” or “madcap” mean.
Frak.
And frell, though I haven’t encountered that one as much in the wild.
Yeah, you don’t hear ‘frell’ very often these days.
But, ‘frak’ may actually make it over the threshold into the safety of “Real” words.
I actually heard some tweener use it just last week.
As in, “they says we shouldn’t apply ‘fracking’ to that unstable shale because it might lead to pollution of the water table.”
Mind you, it was rather curious that the young lady would use the word in that manner, but I suppose she must have been some geochemical prodigy or something like that.
Cromulent
Shazbot!
Did Kim Possible create the word “sitch” (as in “what’s the sitch?”) or was it existing teen slang?
“Frack” is not “frak”. Frack is a term used by the industry for hydraulic fracturing or often high-pressure hydraulic fracturing. It’s a piece of industrial jargon that has made it into the public consciousness due to the controversy. Frak, of course, comes from Battlestar Galactica as a replacement for other profanities and is, in my opinion, tanj annoying.
“Holy something” long predates Batman, both the comic and TV show. For instance holy cow, holy mackerel, holy Moses! all have 19th century cites in OED, and holy vexation and holy cow have cites from the early 1920s and 1940s respectively.