Winter sports words

For several years now I have been checking the Sol Steinmetz book There's a Word for It in November to see what words entered the English language 100 years previously. Steinmetz lists year by year the words that first appeared somewhere in print.

Ulrich Salchow

Looking at the 1921 list I notice that several new words that year had to do with winter sports: goalie, power play, salchow and slalom. I don't know why this might have been so, but it may have had some connection with the Winter Olympics that would be held for the first time in 1924 in France. Perhaps sports like hockey, figure skating and skiing were just gaining popularity in 1921. These words may have already been in use among insiders who actually participated in these sports, but now they were starting to appear in newspapers, magazines and books. I'm just guessing here, but that seems to be the way new words come into the language: First they are mentioned in speech by a few people, then somebody writes them down and they gradually become familiar to the general population.

It seems easier to understand why certain other words appeared on the scene in 1921: Chaplinesque, Chekhovian, Gandhian, Dodgem, Fascist, Kiwanis and Tarzan, for example. The pogo stick was invented in 1919, but it apparently didn't get its name until two years later.

Some of the more intriguing words to show up in 1921 were blankie, bouncy, dehumidify, expressionistic, featherbedding, go-getter, goofy, goon, hicksville, peppiness, pin curler, postmodern, razz, saboteur, tearjerker and teenage. There's got to be a history behind each of those words, but that would be somebody else's book.