Slashdot Mirror
OED Science Fiction Database Updated
solferino writes "The Oxford English dictionary commenced a project back in 2001 (Slashdot report) to solicit reader citations of the earliest uses of science fiction words. The most recent OED newsletter covers the progress of the project, which has its own site hosted on a FreeBSD box running a MySQL database engine. An interesting graph on the site shows date of word origin by decade. Surprisingly recent words featured on the site are /avatar/ (1990 - in the VR sense) and /morph/ (1993) - unless the Slashdot readership can report earlier uses?"
Just a bizarre peak around 1940's.
Bombs falling, V2 rockets, mad dash for jet fighters... not surprising the entire culture is leaping into the future.
Scary shit, actually.
I wouldnt classify avatar and morph as "science fiction" words persay. Rather it might be more logical to classify them as "scientific" or "technological", because they are not just used in fiction but rather in everyday speech to refer to real things...
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Nukes, rubber substitutes, better explosives,...
Nothing like a world war to stimulate the imagination.
This story isn't that interesting... In any regard the graph does spark some thought. What accounts for the explosion of new words in the 30's/40's (pun sort of intended). I would have guessed the 20's would have been a more popular time.
mix_master_mike
vafrous
I can remember this word (in the sense of transform into another shape) from Scientific American articles of the late 80s. I wonder if that counts.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I remember Morph being an oooold X-men villain, like late 70s or early 80s.
And his mutant ability was that he was a shapeshifter. He could morph into just about anything.
I don't think its "VR" but the 1980s Ultima series adventure games used Avatar to describe your character.
no one would care about this article unless the obligatory OS it is running on comment is made.
*sigh*
I searched for but could not find:
Bite my shiny metal ass
its full of stars
Spock, why does your underwear have three legs?
I don't think that this project is complete yet.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
...in case of Slashdotting.
The Army reading list
Are they saying morph was not used until 1993? morph
Wonder how Mysql will handle the slashdot load? With luck we can get a performance statement from the site owners
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
In the future, these sites will be a great tool. Imagine in 100-200 years, there will be a map of the English language that is traceable to a degree not currently possible, and we'll all understand language patterns better. I have heard that something like 10% of Shakespeare is completely lost in translation due to changes in the language, so one can only imagine what a resource like this will be able to provide for future generations -- hopefully, there won't be as much cultural reinvention (i.e. the printing press: China -> Europe)
stuff |
It wasn't the war exactly.
It was the massive spending on R&D.
There was plenty of new development involved in the trips to the moon.
Some of the best "words" developed in the 1960s probably involved personal research and LSD trips.
"Morph" was a clay-mation character who appeared on UK kids tv from 1978 onwards. He was animated by Aardman Animations (who later went on to make "Wallace and Gromit" and "Chicken Run") and appeared on shows with Tony Hart (recently interviewed by b3ta)
Wasn't one of the functions of religion to explain scientific systems and phenomena? Weren't the stories of Gods on Olympus essentially science fiction for the audiences of the time? The observable forces of nature, as best understood at the time, duking it out for entertainment and fantasy purposes, but also closely tied with what was a more-or-less best-guess of scientific principals.
My question-- where do you draw the line between "science fiction" and mythology/religion?
From the creaters of Wallace and Gromit, Morph! A cheeky bit of plastercine. More a name than a word, but he could 'morph' into lots of shapes. And this was back in 1980!
I used to subscribe to a commercial BBS named 'Avatar' around 1986.
A lot of the dates seem awfully late. For instance, for "cloaking device" they list 1996(!) and 1981 editions of books, while mentioning that, oh hey, Star Trek may have used the phrase "cloaking device" in the sixties, but we'd need to see the script to verify.
I don't understand: why does a usage have to be on paper to count for this project?
dinosaur comics
without much work, i found an *ancient* use of the word morph, as a verb.
google groups
of course, these may very well not match OED definitions of a good citation, but i would think you could then compare to other sources, like news papers and magazines.
it is exciting (being both a computer and language/words geek) to see such a project, though. it will surely keep the pressure on the OED to modernize and improve, as well as to accept other kinds of citations.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Hahaha.
WWII was fought against a axis that used military might. The new agenda means beating up a bunch of poor people who's only weapons are terror and suicide.
A whole lot of new words to describe political manipulation of entire societies? yeah...
Yah, and I don't think I'd qualify "persay" as a word, per se.
I don't think I'd qualify "Yah" as a word, either.
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
Everyone knows the word Morph's first use in science fiction can be traced back to Lord Albiron's 1929 novel "Danger, Danger High voltage." Quoting from the 3rd edition (Bantam), p. 33, 3rd paragraph :
"Blast it Timmy!, that durn George Bush specimen has morphed into some kind dumb ass nucular monkey. They must be running some kind of avatar process on him."
I'll never forget the first time i read that.
HAD
The most recent OED newsletter covers the progress of the project, which has its own site hosted on a FreeBSD box running a MySQL database engine.
Ah yes, it's not enough to simply point to an "interesting" story (whether this one qualifies or not is debatable). You have to mentioned that the potential Slashdot victim is running some sort of OSS.
Seriously, is it newsworthy that these guys are running their little show on FreeBSD and MySQL? Besides which, I couldn't find anything on their site which actually says "we're running FreeBSD and MySQL." So not only is it immaterial, it's also possibly wrong.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"Morph" was also the lovable pink shapeshifting parrot alien from Disney's "Treasure Planet" who in this picture looks like he's auditioning for a Fark photoshop contest.
And by the way, how'd you turn off the bracketed "[toonhound.com]" that should have appeared next to your link? Hmm.
I don't know where I read this but:
"Morph [toonhound.com]" was a clay-mation character who appeared on UK kids tv from 1978 onwards. He was animated by Aardman Animations (who later went on to make "Wallace and Gromit" and "Chicken Run") and appeared on shows with Tony Hart
Also From the creaters of Wallace and Gromit, Morph [aardman.com]! A cheeky bit of plastercine. More a name than a word, but he could 'morph' into lots of shapes. And this was back in 1980!
The orignial meaning of the name Satan was adversary, opponent, etc...
But the name has morphed over time and now it just seems to mean evil demon or somesuch.
It's really fascinating to do some exploritory research in to where various words in the english language are really derived. For example, the word person comes from the greek word personae, which means mask. Strange at first but once one realizes that in the greek tragedy's the actors wore "personae" to depict a certain character. The natural evolution was the adaptation of the word to represent an individual. Language has this tendency to move from concrete to abstract, some may feel this is offtopic but I think it's important to understand where our words come from. It helps you understand the memtic nature of a culture quite a bit more.
"android (n.) antedating 1727 (From the Chambers Cyclopedia)"
What? Who in 1727 came up with the idea of an android (ie, a robot in the form of a human)? And how, considering that "robot" wasn't thought up to the early 1900s? I wish the site was a bit more specific about such an oddity in their listing.
yesterday? :)
What is the earliest usage of the verb "to slashdot"?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I'm pretty sure the term avatar (for VR) predates 1990.
My first memory of the term "Avatar" being used to represent an online persona was on the online service Q-Link aka Quantum Link, a nationwide BBS system for the popular Commodore 64. (The parent company later became AOL.) They had a 2D graphics chat world called "Club Caribe" which I remember using the term "Avatar". (At the time, I thought it was a bit odd, since I was used to the term Avatar being used for the main character of Ultima IV (1985).) This would have been around 1988-1989 or so, which is earlier than the OED citation, although I do not have a printed source backup for this. (Check a C-64 magazine of that time period? Old copies of Compute Gazette, anyone?)
I've found a post from a MUD-Dev mailing list discussion thread held in 2001 on the same topic (what's the earliest use of the term avatar) that supports this recollection, and adds to it that the term might have been used by the predecessor of Club Caribe, Lucasfilm's Habitat (1984-1988), or possibly even earlier by Jaron Lanier. Again, no paper-based backup on this.
Regarding the term "morph", 1993 doesn't sound too far off; it might be a year or two earlier though. I ran across the term in late 1993 when trying to replicate the morphing process used by Michael Jackson's "Black or White" music video for a computer graphics class (based on a white paper by Pacific Data Images). Both that video and Terminator 2: Judgement Day which used morphing came out in 1992. The CG morphing technique was known as morphing when I took the class in 1993. I'm not sure the PDI white paper used the term morphing though, so maybe the term's name caught on some time after the video came out. So it might be 1993, but I wouldn't be surprised if the term was used in 1992.
--LP
It already was.
> ... other news, like a 10th planet being found ...
German IT-Site heise has the story.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/45578
But this would not really be the 10th "planet" but the 11th... AFAIK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaoar and Sedna are quite similar.
cd pub; more beer
However, this is the beginning of something that will be interesting in a couple decades. I'd like to see how these numbers change over time.
Right now we have a peak of new Sci Fi words from the 40s and 50s (about 50 years ago). The slope is shallow coming up to the present, but the drop off is steep to the 20s and earlier.
Does this mean it takes about 40-50 years for new words to work their way into a more main stream usage, but then they fall out of fashion quickly? If so, the shape of the graph would change little over time, just the years along the X-axis would advance.
On the other hand, this could mean peaks in new words correspond to peaks in scientific innovation or other social factors. What we see happening to language in the 40s and 50s could correspond to the heightened anxiety of WWII and the cold war. Or it could follow the historic changes to our fundamental understanding of the universe occurring during the first couple decades of the century.
Of course, none of that can be determined from this one snap shot. Nothing to see here folks...yet.
He's just waiting on the dupe.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is not a "typical" dictionary, for those of you who are not familiar with it.
I noticed several people mentioning concerns about the use of words prior to some of the dates mentioned and also about non-print use of words. The thing is, the OED attempts to define words as they have been used in printed literature. In other words, without the Star-Trek script that illustrates the use of the term "cloaking device", they cannot verify it and date it properly.
The thinking, if I am not mistaken, is based on the idea that a word in published print has gone through an editing process. The editor is then responsible for making sure that the words used in the final publication are valid and used accurately. The OED attempts to catalog any new words or new uses of existing words that appear after having gone through this process. The assumption being that any new words or new uses of words are now "valid" as a result of having been printed.
Whether you agree with this process is probably not relevant; but that is the way that I understand it to work.
If you would like more information you should read the book "The Professor and The Madman" by Simon Winchester. It's a great story that details how the OED came to be; and Mr. Winchester is a fine autor.
Is this the third, or the fourth time they've found a Tenth planet?
All hail our new tennis-ball-in-eliptical-orbit overlords!
--
It was posted yesterday, you ninny-head.
HAD
if you want prior art, Morph is from the Greek word "morph", meaning to form or shape.
Is it really necessary to mention it's running MySQL and FreeBSD? I know this is a tech site, but geez; who cares how the database works, it's completely irrelevant to the article.
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
Emotive vote? Isn't emotive reaction exactly what got the US into the deep shit in the middle east in the first place? "We've gotta get them evil-doers!"?
Bury the dead, deal with the situation, assasinate the terrorist cells you find and negotiate with the remains - embarking on a public crusade is just, I don't know, vulgar.
How soon will it be before the words we write down and read in our sci-fi novels will be listed? Words such as 'hyper reality' 'time displacement' 'microverse' 'grok!'. And these are only a few with more be created everyday as authors around the globe write down the dreams and designs of our futures. What they write we will eventually do. We've already proven that.
Why do I get the impression that the europeans might actually speak a language that the terrorists understand.
(I'm not sure if the "negotiate with the remains" was intentional but it sure made me laugh... "remains" to me means dead terrorists)
I'd swear Vernor Vinge used avatar in True Names (early 80's?), but I don't have a copy and can't seem to Google it or find it in Amazon.
... there ... 4 a.m.
Anybody?
I doubt
I received for Christmas, "The Meaning of Everything", by Simon Winchester. This gives a very interesting and compelling account of the genesis of the dictionary, some of the very strange characters who contributed and the process by which entries are constructed. A very interesting read.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Submitting Science Fiction Citations to the OED:
So, unless you have a physical copy - e.g. a game manual, story booklet, etc. - OED won't accept it.
The word "Morph" is Greek. Claiming it is a recently invented science fiction term is ludicrous. As is the word "Avatar", which is a sanskrit word for the embodiement of Vishnu.
It took me two seconds to find this information on dictionary.com. It baffles me how a site claiming to be affiliated to the OED could make such errors.
I guess I am an even smaller, sad little man than I thought...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The 30's and 40's is when the science fiction magazines got started, and most of the authors whose works are considered "the classics" of science fiction got their start with those mags.
We've all been through puberty and I guess nations have to go through it too.
You can go out this decade, but remember to be back by eleven or you're grounded for a century! And you've better not to reek of beer when you get back. We and the grandma Asia be awake waiting for you.
So they are the very definition of pedantic, big deal. Just show them one of the novelizations by James Blish or Alan Dean Foster (for the animated ones) that came out a couple of years later.
-Dave
I am pretty sure that Heinlein was the first sci fi author to use the term "lag" in the same sense that we use it on irc. I'd have to do a text search of _Time_Enough_For_Love_ to find the exact spot.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
That's because the character was an avatar in the traditional sense of the word; the plot of Ultima IV was the character's quest to become an embodiment and exemplar of the 8 virtues. It has nothing to do with the word "avatar" in the VR sense, which is the usage that is being discussed here.
avatar
n.
2. An embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype: the very avatar of cunning.
WW2 was a technological war, possibly the last one, since we passed an event horizon with Hiroshima: bombs big enough to kill all life on the planet.
It seems to me that they are missing "Grok." Seems rather strange that they would leave that one out. I use it on a daily basis, and so do most other people I know.
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
It's over. The moderation system is officially borked beyond all possible repair.
Anybody know what the acronym BOLO stands for? BOLO from the Keith Laumer series.
I know where 'grok' came from (Robert A. Heinlein in his Stranger in a Strange Land), 'offog' ('Allamagoosa", by Eric Frank Russell (1955) but anyone know where 'tackymat' came from?
Shouldn't that quote be "Bubble headed ninny" or some such. You need to get your quotes straight, after all .. they might end up in this DB .. lol
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Looking at the graph with so few words attributed to the 1900's surprised me. Then doing a search on the page of the list of words for "verne" returned no hits, which surprised me even further. I would think that "20,00 Leauges Under the Sea" would be good for at least one word.
Err ... nevermind. I Googled again and found it here. No "avatar".
...
Ignore the man behind the iron curtain
The guy who wrote that MUD-Dev list posting, Randy Farmer, was one of the founding coders of Habitat/Club Caribe. He claims in that posting to have originated use of the term, although he credits the _concept_ to at least two other fictional works, Vernor Vinge's "True Names" and John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider".
I believe my first recollection of Avatar was in Vernor Vinge's "True Names", published 1981. ("True Names & Other Dangers", a collection of short stories which included it, was published in 1987)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
was '1984' an sci-fi novel?
or was it political fiction?
Orwell imagined the world 36 years into the future. he put some fictious inventions into the book (sea fortress, pr0n assembling machines, on-wall TV-sets with build-in webcams ? ).
is 'Big Brother' an sci-fi term?
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
The dates that are listed for morph and avatar are a little bit confusing - they are for certain specific uses, not for when the word was invented.
:)
Morph in the sense described is the computer shape change like in Terminator 2 or that old Michael Jackson face shift video (the heck if I can remember the name), not the greek word for changing shape, which has been used for lots of stuff WAAAAY before then.
Avatar in VR is the user's VR form, or in a different wording, the character being role-played in the VR world. Literally it means embodiment of form, so it makes sense. This is not related to the original meaning of Avatar, which I think has something to do with Vishnu (the Hindi god) who would come to earth often in some other form.
Hey - all those days of D&D playing in high school do have some practical use - with both words
The first film use of "morphing" technology was in the [underrated] Fantasy film, Willow, which was released in 1988, predating the chart's listing of 1993 for that term's first use. Terminator 2 was in 1991, and used morphing tech extensively. Both of these films had book and graphic novel versions, so they should still be considered for proper citation.
Avatar goes back at least a few more years as the name of an all-powerful user and the name was common for systems.
I think my favorite history I found was for corpsicle. Apparently a easy sci-fi concept that needed a silly term. And then reused by many of the better names in sci-fi books.
NM
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Alot of the early usage cited in the article from Heinlein stories of the 1940s-50s, were actually first written about in the 1938-39 novel, "For Us, the Living". This book, published posthumously(sp?) just this year, contains references to slide-walks, space-ports, air-cars and several other technologies that showed up in his later writing.
-MattT *** Not speaking for my employer, or any other sentient beings ***
Especially funny since the OED is considering adding fembot to the OED as a whole.
I recall a Slashdot reference to this as well, but could not find it searching on "fembot" with the Slashdot search function.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://www.toonhound.com/morph.htm :)
Interociter (THIS ISLAND EARTH, 1955) is not listed!
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
This was easy enough to get as a google search (having seen the origin before)
The 1920 story/play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) Czech Author: Karel Capek, however his brother Josef is credited with coining the word.
I am unable to cite this correctly, not having the original publication, but am sending it off in any event.
It would seem even the simplest SciFi words should be considered for submission. So rack your brains then do a search.
(from the play, English translation, page 1):
On the right-hand wall are fastened printed placards:
"CHEAP LABOR. ROSSUM'S ROBOTS."
"ROBOTS FOR THE TROPICS. 150 DOLLARS EACH."
"EVERYONE SHOULD BUY HIS OWN ROBOT."
"DO YOU WANT TO CHEAPEN YOUR OUTPUT? ORDER ROSSUM'S ROBOTS":
Letter To Iran
[Your search-fu is powerful, I thought I'd be first with this one]
I found that one, as well as other references through the next decade culminating in several 1991 references to existing morphing software for the Amiga. I think they're mistaking a meaning in common usage for a word derived from SF, because it sounds like a science fiction idea.
I guess they must be using patent examiners to do their research.
In terms of computer graphics lingo, MORPH was developed by the special effects gurus at Lucasfilm in 1986/7 for the 1988 release of the Ron Howard film, Willow.
I think they even talked of how the word was developed in the making-of documentary.
In the extra commentary on the DVD "Willow," They mention being the first movie use of morphing software (called M.O.R.F.) for the scene where Willow returns Razel to her original form. Most of the other effects were done by traditional film means. This would have been 1988 or thereabouts.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
The book centres on one contributor in particular, an American expat/Civil War veteran named Dr W.C. Minor, who submitted tens of thousands of entries from his room in a criminal asylum. If you're into Victorian madness, the English language or both, it's worth a read.
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
And I suppose they think the actors were just standing up there making it up as they went along.
If they can't find the script, I recall a novelication collection (single book) of the early Star Trek episodes that included "Balance of Terror". I'm sure the term was used there as well.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I always thought they preferred to see examples of the word being used in print
sources; I didn't think they generally went by private letters or whatnot, and
I'm thinking usenet would be in the latter category. (Informal sources often
show slang terms that have not yet passed into general usage; when you start
seeing the word in books and journal articles, it starts being mainstream.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
One of the most interesting things the OED project has shown is that the majority of new words have come from a small number of highly innovative writers.
In the 1930's, it was authors like E.E. Smith, Jack Williamson, and C.L. Moore who were the greatest word-coiners. The even greater explosion of new terms in the 1940's is mainly due to Heinlein and Asimov, plus a few others who were trying to keep up with them.
This association between imaginative writing and the creation of new vocabulary goes way back. Lewis Carroll enriched the language greatly. And Horace Walpole, who wrote the first gothic novel in the 18th century (and is thus the grandfather of modern science fiction and fantasy), made up the word "serendipity" and is extensively cited in the OED for new or unique usages of existing words.
Still, I went from the slashdot link to the graph, from there to "Science Fiction", then to "How to Cite"
These pages did not mention the "no need to cite" clause.
I feel a little embarrassed in that I had seen this site once before from a slashdot posting long ago, and now remember the "no need to cite" from back then.
It would seem someone should have the definitive glossary of attributable coinage, and it might help if this site linked to it. No doubt they are being barraged right now with unneeded words that they consider of known origin (mine included).
Oh the shame!
BTW, can anyone give a reference to killbot before Furturama? I'm betting it's out there somewhere.
Letter To Iran
Or is it just me?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Morph" was the name of Nick Parks' (of Wallace and Gromit fame) first televised claymation character. So called because he would, well, morph into different objects during the course of the sequence. It was a short spot on an afternoon children's TV show in the UK, originating in 1976: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/goingout/2004 /02/09/aardman.shtml
The classic Nintendo game Metroid featured a morph ball mode in its original version. Anyone else remember Samus Aran rolling around and bombing her way to the next level? I think it was 1988 or so.
--
Support Your Constitution, Americans! (please, we don't want your police force running around the planet with off-kilter policies like these)
That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and is the subject of very considerable debate. Frankly, I think the Wikipedia entry gives a little too much credence to it, IIRC psychologists think it's only true in a very weak sense.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Science fiction, under whatever name, goes back centuries. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a story about a rocketship to the moon in 1657!
I think the crucial thing that happened in the 30s is that the English-speaking world started to be dominated by an industrial, rather than an agricultural, economy. As the population became more technical, so did its taste in adventure stories.
Does anyone have any publications from 1985 mentioning avatars in the 'Habitat' game? If so, then the OED would presumably be interested.
This web page, and others say:
In 1985 at Lucasfilm, the inventor Chip Morningstar, working with his colleague Randall Farmer, created Habitat,... Chip needed a term to describe the digital personification of users in the Habitat worlds and he chose the word avatar, for its meaning from Hindu theology...
Shakespeare wrote for people's entertainment. Figuring out his witty turns of phrase was part of the fun. Generations of English teachers have taken Shakespeare way too seriously. People never actually talked that way!
One of the most interesting things the OED project has shown is that the majority of new words have come from a small number of highly innovative writers.
...) appeared in print for the first time in Shakespeare's plays.
Yes, although this is not totally unexpected. It's well known that a few thousand common English words and phrases (e.g. "investment", "obscene", "bedroom", "upstairs"
I am not totally convinced though that we ought to say that these writers invented those words. The first appearance of the compound word "Base ball" is due to Jane Austen. But practically no-one thinks that she invented the word or the sport.
Submit these words to a free resource, not the OED - the OED is *SO* not free. WTF?
It comes from the mongol verb slash'dut, meaning to commandeer trade routes. First known user was Genghis Khan, who successfully conducted a DDOS across most of the known world 1215-1227.
Back in college, a group of us SF fans were trying to explain to our dorm's resident director (an English major grad student) what science fiction was.
After a while, he responded: "Let me see if I grok this".
He didn't understand why everyone started laughing.
More specifically in the "VR" sense, does anyone else remember "Club Caribe?" This was a feature of Quantum Link, the C-64 based predecessor to AOL. C.C. was a surprisingly sophisticated virtual environment, something like a simplified version of "Animal Crossing" with elements of "The Sims Online." The user could navigate a character around a cartoony island resort, interacting with characters of other online users, spending virtual money to buy stuff (including replacement heads), and occasionally solving puzzles. The player-characters were called Avatars. This was around 1989-1990.
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
(for example) is rich enough and (because of mandatory service) widespread enough to make its appearance in more "literary" contexts; Hebrew is also very amenable to nickname and acronym formation (even long-dead Torah scholars are commonly referred to by strange semi-acronymistic [?] names.)
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
In the Torah
a clay artificial man
predates Frankenstien
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers