Hollywood and holistic turn 100

Hollywood — the term, not the place — turned 100 this year. Today many, if not most, movies are made somewhere else. It can be cheaper to make a movie in Atlanta or Vancouver than in a Hollywood studio. And so the word has come to mean less the place where movies are made than the activity itself or the lifestyle.

Each year at this time I open the Sol Steinmetz book There's a Word for It, published in 2010, and celebrate some of the words that have just turned 100. Hollywood is one of them.

1926 was a year, a few years after the Great War and a few years before the Great Depression, when people were feeling great. There was relatively new technology, and people were inventing new words to refer to new devices. That year brought us both fridge and mike, short for refrigerator and microphone.

And speaking of technology and new ways of doing things, it was also the year that gave us angioplasty, bar-b-q, cosmetic surgery, cosmetician, market research, nutritionist, pressure-cook and meals-on-wheels.

Not all was roses that year, however. There were hints of darker times. The words totalitarian and totalitarianism came into existence that year.

And then there were all those other words that entered the English language 100 years ago: airtime, blooper, boosterism, combo, cultish, downturn, expandable, fantasize, finagle, gig, gimmick, holistic, hormonal, online, pep talk, punditry, quickie, recycle and tunesmith.

Our language would be much less rich without 1926.