[Ads-l] Arnold Zwidky in OED

[Shapiro, Fred]

I see in the latest release of new OED entries that Arnold Zwicky's coinage "recency illusion" has been added to the OED.  Congratulations, Arnold !

Fred Shapiro



recency illusion  n. the belief or impression that something that one has just noticed oneself (esp. a word, grammatical construction, etc.) is of recent origin, when it is in fact long-established.Cf. frequency illusion n. at frequency n. Additions<https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/74513#eid1262215040>.
2005   A. Zwicky Lang. Log 7 Aug. in http://itre.cis.upenn.edu (blog, Internet Archive Wayback Machine 10 Sept. 2005)    We have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent... Again and again—retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc.—the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think.
2010   @4ndyman 12 Mar. in twitter.com (accessed 16 July 2019)    Surprised to discover that the word ‘fanzine’ is around 70 years old! Victim of the recency illusion, I guess.


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