Cool Words Properly Historicized

Even the seemingly up-to-the-minute “bae,” a word that means babe or baby and is so new that most of its written use is in personal communications, has a print trail back to the early 2000s, and is probably a descendant of the reduplicative nickname Bae Bae, a rendering of “baby,” which shows up in print in the 1990s. In some cases, bae is older than the people using it. (It also has its own spurious acronymic etymology, “before anyone else.”)

I am convinced that the favorite pastime of linguists, who are, by definition, Olds, is showing up to point out that they knew about words like “bae” before everybody else — even the patient zero of a given piece of slang! — forever perpetuating their sense of cultural omniscience, as if, without their permission, “swag” wouldn’t merely be wrong, but it would never exist in the first place. (via)