The Lexicon
The period words the archive marks with a dotted underline, gathered in one place: what each meant, the earliest use the record fixes, and the register it carried. Dates and definitions follow the archive’s lexical-dating research; dictionary datings are the dictionaries’ (OED, Green’s Dictionary of Slang), press datings the press’s.
- 24-7
Continuously; around the clock and every day of the week, without pause. First fixed in print describing a college basketball player said to practice at all hours; spreading through the 1990s.
- boundaries (emotional)
Limits a person sets on what they will accept from others, in the therapeutic sense. From mid-1980s recovery literature; available in period speech but marked — it still carried the sound of the support group.
- charticle
A hybrid of chart and article that carries its argument in a graphic rather than in prose — a trade coinage of the mid-1990s magazine floor.
- chill (out)
To relax; to calm down. The relax sense reaches back to 1969, carried through "Rapper’s Delight" in 1979 and Afrika Bambaataa in 1980 — old speech that still sounded current in 1990.
- diss
To show disrespect; to insult or dismiss, in the hip-hop sense. Fixed in hip-hop by the early 1980s and current through the whole period, long before the general press caught it.
- gotcha journalism
The interview conducted to catch its subject out rather than to inform — a trade coinage of the late 1980s, in circulation on editorial floors through the whole period.
- in denial
Refusing to acknowledge a plain fact about oneself, in the pop-psychological sense. The clinical "denial" dates to the 1910s; the set phrase entered general speech in the 1980s and was ordinary by the period.
- lede
The opening of a story, in the newsroom’s deliberate misspelling — a working trade term since the 1960s, spoken on every editorial floor as a native language and heard by nobody there as jargon.
- my bad
An admission of error — possessive front-loaded, noun bare, no apology attached. Playground and basketball speech through the 1980s, reported as a novelty by the general press in 1989, moving off the court thereafter.
- proactive
Acting in advance rather than reacting — the decade’s defining management buzzword. Coined by Viktor Frankl in 1946, vaulted into office speech by Stephen Covey’s first habit, "Be Proactive," in 1989.
- props
Due respect, publicly given — proper respect clipped to one syllable. In print by 1990 and standard in hip-hop speech before that, one of the period words with the longest documented history behind it.
- reach out
To contact someone — a phone call or letter wearing advertising language. From the Bell System’s long-running "Reach out and touch someone" campaign, on the air from 1979; conspicuous ad-speak in period offices, not neutral usage.
- toxic (of a person)
Applied to a person or relationship that undermines rather than supports. Lillian Glass’s 1995 book Toxic People put the word to that use; it is available from 1995 forward and not before.
- whatever (dismissive)
A one-word dismissal that ends an argument by declining it. Catalogued in a 1989 dictionary of college slang, with citations reaching back to 1965; carried to a national audience by Clueless in 1995.