When Commonly Used Words Got Their Start - Labor Day Edition

Now here is your lesson for Labor Day - While you may inspire a new word, you may not like how it will follow you to your grave... For example, look how General Motors first inspired today's word... but then ignored it, only to rediscover it... all over again... But just like a spurned lover, the new version now only lives to remind them, what fools they were to forget so easily....Ohhh the vitriol of words that change on you....

DOWNSIZE (1975)

Future historians will probably choose October 1973 as the most significant
month and year of the twentieth century. It was in that month that the members
of OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) imposed
their first oil embargo against the industrialized nations of the Western world.

As fuel prices began their relentless climb, American motorists turned increasingly to small, fuel-efficient cars from Japan. Detroit, the North American automotive capital, eventually got the message — and began trimming the fat from its corpulent gas guzzlers. A new word was needed to describe what was happening, and Time was one of the first magazines to use it on September 13, 1976: “All the automakers are already at work down-sizing their cars for 1978 and later years.”

When the 1978 models appeared, many of them had the lean — but not hungry — look. The four intermediate cars from General Motors had been downsized by about eight inches and had lost up to eight hundred and twenty-five pounds of superfluous tonnage. But, as the Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English points out, not everyone was happy with this new word: “Technicially to downsize means to reduce the exterior dimensions of an automobile while the passenger area and trunk remain the same or are increased. Car manufacturers and others in the industry prefer the older word resized to describe the new generation of smaller cars, claiming that downsized suggests a degrading of the product’s appearance or quality.”

Now that we have entered the twenty-first century, downsize has taken on a new primary usage: as a euphemism for corporate decisions to lay off or fire large numbers of people at once.

(From- 500 YEARS OF NEW WORDS BY BILL SHERK © Bill Sherk 2004)

Moral: When you don't pay enough attention: except to your bottom line, nor to what other folks are doing, and what most people expect of you, you may pay a price, you suddenly can't pass on to the consumer....