Something on The British Library...

I was looking at this text on The British Library’s website. The reason I found this particular timeline interesting, even though there were others on the website, was because of how they decided to end the timeline. Although the last part of the timeline was "1900s - present day", many of the coinages that they included were quite old, such as "gasmasks" and "gobstoppers", and surprisingly didn't include any of the newer neologisms such as "selfie" or "duckface". However, this is likely to be the case because this aspect of the website is unlikely to be constantly updated possibly because of time which suggests this is a constraint of the text. Another reason why this text may not have included new coinages is possibly because of the audience which could possibly be older people and so newer neologisms may not have felt necessary to include and they may have given the timeline more an informal tone rather than giving the impression that the text is for informing purposes and may need to show a more formal tone. In the text I found the use of the noun "weirdo" which comes from the root word "weird" which is an adjective, the coinage seems to have come from the conversion of the root word to an adjective by affixing a non-standard suffix of “o”. This isn’t uncommon as this seems to have happened to other words too such as “sad” has become “saddo” and “psyche” has become “psycho”. This word could be evidence for both diachronic and synchronic language change because the root word’s denotations could be considered diachronic language change because when it was first coined it used to mean fantastic, bizarre and have connotations of the supernatural. Over time it seems to the adjective “weird” has become more pejorative and have connotations of “freak” and “strange”. “Weirdo” could be evidence for synchronous language change because this seems to be more of a recent coinage, and from the timeline, we can tell it happened during the 1900s.