"I need to clean off the deck," I sighed this morning, cringing at the clutter of empty hanging baskets, pots for plants, dead leaves, and the remains of an empty bird nest I had recently knocked from the rafters. As I mentally added the task to my ever so long list of spring chores, I took a deep breath and remembered what I realized this morning: When I retire? There should be nothing stopping me checking off everything on my to-do list. I may finally organize my life.
"This place is going to be spic and span when I retire!" I told Heidi, who raised her eyebrows and nodded appreciatively. "Spic and span!" I repeated, and then wondered where that phrase (as accurate as it was to describe my post-retirement aspirations) came from. I haven't heard it in a while, I thought. Is it some kind of slur I should remove from my vocabulary?
Thank goodness for the internet when it comes to questions like that. A quick search revealed that the phrase was first seen in print in 1665. It derives from "spiksplinternieuw" a Dutch expression about brand new ships and their spiky wood splinters. My research also led me to a nifty feature that the Merriam-Webster website has, called Time Traveler. There you can read all the words that were first seen in print in any given year; it is like a time-elapsed view of the evolution our language.
What other words were first published in 1665? Notably to me on the list of 94 were amok, biography, fossil, putty, rationalize, and volcano, but the list is fascinating, and you would certainly be intrigued.
Playing around with it, instead of cleaning the deck, (rabbit hole: 1938) I also discovered that zip code, T-ball, salsa, ramen, and porn weren't part of the language until 1962. What a year of innovation that was!
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