Shirt a Phobia

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Not to be confused with Recency bias.

The recency illusion is the belief or impression, on the part of someone who has only recently become aware of a long-established phenomenon, that the phenomenon itself must be of recent origin. The term was coined by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University who is 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]

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

Examples

The use of they, them, or their to reference a singular antecedent without specific gender, as in “If George or Sally come by, give them the package”, is known as the singular they. Although this usage is often cited as a modern invention,[3] it is quite old,[4][a] and has been in regular use in formal contexts as far back as the 14th century.[5][6]

Other examples include doable from Middle English, legit from the 1890s, and high in the sense of ‘intoxicated‘ from the 1920s.[7][8][9] The use of OMG, an abbreviation for oh my God, was first recorded in 1917 in a letter to Winston Churchill.[10]

The Tiffany problem is the phenomenon that names like Tiffany may appear anachronistic in historical fiction, despite being historically attested, due to their modern usage.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage noted, “Although the lack of a common-gender third person pronoun has received much attention in recent years from those concerned with women’s issues, the problem, as felt by writers, is much older” (1989, page 901).

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. ^ a b Zwicky, Arnold (7 August 2005). “Just between Dr. Language and I”. Language Log. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  3. ^ Mora, Celeste (May 12, 2020). “What Is the Singular They, and Why Should I Use It?”. Grammarly blog. Grammarly. Retrieved July 9, 2021. Admittedly, using the singular they in a formal context may still cause some raised eyebrows, so be careful if you’re submitting a paper to a particularly traditional teacher or professor. But the tides are turning, and English will soon be more efficient
  4. ^ Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Merriam Webster. 1989. ISBN 978-0-87779-132-4.
  5. ^ The American Heritage Book of English Usage: A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 1996. ISBN 978-0-547-56321-3.
  6. ^ Pullum, Geoffrey (13 April 2012). “Sweden’s gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun”. Archived from the original on 8 May 2016. Retrieved 28 March 2023. […] our pronoun they was originally borrowed into English from the Scandinavian language family […] and since then has been doing useful service in English as the morphosyntactically plural but singular-antecedent-permitting gender-neutral pronoun known to linguists as singular they
  7. ^ Shariatmadari, David (2014-07-01). “11 words that are much older than you think”. The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2026-03-28.
  8. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, “doable (adj. & n.),” March 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1072394857.
  9. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, “legit (n.2, adj., & adv.),” September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7965676439.
  10. ^ N; P; R (2017-09-09). “‘OMG’ Turns 100″. NPR. Retrieved 2026-03-28.

Further reading