Recency illusion

The recency illusion is the belief or impression that a word or language usage is of recent origin when it is long-established.

The term was invented by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University who was primarily interested in examples involving words, meanings, phrases, and grammatical constructions.[1]

However, use of the term is not restricted to linguistic phenomena: Zwicky has defined it simply as, "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent".[2]

Linguistic items prone to the Recency Illusion include:

According to Zwicky, the illusion is caused by selective attention.[2]

See also

References

  1. Rickford, John R.; Wasow, Thomas; Zwicky, Arnold (2007). "Intensive and quotative all: something new, something old". American Speech. 82 (1): 3–31. doi:10.1215/00031283-2007-001.
  2. 1 2 Zwicky, Arnold (7 August 2005). "Just between Dr. Language and I". Language Log. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  3. 1 2 Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Merriam Webster. 1989.
  4. Shakespeare, William (1594). "Act IV, Scene 3". The Comedy of Errors. There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend
  5. Zimmer, Benjamin. "Literally: a history". Language Log.
  6. Lippi-Green, Rosina (1997). English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415559102.
  7. root (14 February 2011). "Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value (RFM) Definition". Investopedia.
  8. "recency". Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Further reading

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