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. 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”.
The above text is retrieved from the Wikipedia article “Recency Illusion“, which has been released under theGNU Free Documentation License. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
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