Older Than They Think/Other Media: Difference between revisions

* The phrase "trick out" seems like an example of modern, urban slang. Actually, John Austin used it in ''The Province of Jurisprudence Determined'', first published in 1832, and the phrase is probably much older. It's even used in the modern sense of [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=trick+ out "to adorn or decorate in an extravagant or gaudy manner"].

* Another unexpectedly old phrase: "I guess". ''[[Geoffrey Chaucer (Creator)|Geoffrey Chaucer]]'' used it, in the modern sense, in ''[[The Canterbury Tales (Literature)|The Canterbury Tales]]''.

** And then there is Agobard of Lyons, who wrote about the peasants belief in flying ships coming from "Magonia, the land beyond the clouds inhabited by wizards" and how they ruined crops and kidnapped people only to return them to the same place after some time (maybe even years). All this ''right in Carolingian times'' (roughly 800AD to 1000AD).

* Graffiti is pretty damn old -- Pompeii (yes, ''that'' one) was famous for it. Quite a bit of it involves sex, and is downright [http://www.homepagedaily.com/Pages/article6340-graffiti-from-pompei.aspx hilarious.] [[NSFW]].

** In the show ''The Naked Archaeologist'', host Simcha Jacobovici once presented evidence that non-pictorial written language was first invented by Jewish rebels in Egypt as a code their enemies couldn't read, and part of his evidence was graffiti in an ancient Egyptian work camp reading "El [God] save me." So our alphabet could have been created ''specifically for'' graffiti.

** Chaucer's Miller's Tale (d. 1400): "[[Middle English|But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers]]" -- and this is not [[Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe]].

** Also, the self-same "Götz" had a iron prosthetic hand, which makes those [[Older Than They Think]] as well.

** Likewise, leather bars date to the return of U.S. soliders in WWII largely on the West Coast taking up residence in biker bars - both masculine types of gay men dating back to time immemorial.

* The name [[Conan]] was not invented by [[Robert E Howard]]. It is an old Irish name dating back to [[The Dark Ages]], which is where the Irish-descended [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] and Conan O'Brien derive it from.

* What is usually called the "Christian" calendar was introduced, in substantially its present form, in 45BC -- some 80 years before the birth of Christianity.

** Referring to it as the Gregorian calender is becoming more common, so this example's tenure on this page might be running out. For the sake of completeness, the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calenders is... [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|three days every four hundred years]], increasing the time it takes to gain a day from 128 years to 3300.

* Shopping malls were the product of 50s American suburban consumerism, right? Providence, Rhode Island opened an indoor shopping center called the Westminster Arcade in 1828. Cleveland, Ohio opened its own Arcade in 1890 (here's what it looked like [http://www.shorpy.com/node/7402 in 1901]), and even before them indoor markets were built in England and Russia.

** It's true. The Brits called them "market halls."

*** The ''bazaars'' of the Islamic and Indian empires were shopping malls in all but name and their modern descendants, judging by what goods they sell, are the counterpart of Western malls.

*** And in Rome before the birth of Christ.

* Speaking in the [[Third Person Person|third person]] is [[Older Than Feudalism]]. Julius Caesar refers to himself in the third person throughout his history of the Gallic Wars (a tendency parodied by ''[[Asterix]]'').

* The expression "no go" sounds like some "hip," mid-20th-century urban expression. In fact, its roots ''are'' urban - but it was being used on the East Coast as early as 1838! (Read all about it at [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/503/what-does-ok-stand-for 'What does "OK" stand for?'].) And for that matter, by the 1840s it was already considered funny to deliberately misspell the word as [[Xtreme Kool Letterz|"know go"]].

* The famous story about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) quickly adding up a series of numbers by matching the first and last one, while apocryphal in and of itself, is supposed to demonstrate his genius - but the method already appears in the Tosafot, a group of commentators on the [[Talmud (Literature)|Talmud]] who lived four hundred years earlier.

* Celebrity endorsement of products was common for popular Roman gladiators. The writers of the ''[[Gladiator (Film)|Gladiator]]'' movie considered including that in the script, but thought [[Reality Is Unrealistic|it wouldn't fly]].

* Someone on the webite ''The Escapist'''s forums declared that [[Charlie Brooker]] was ripping off [[Zero Punctuation|Yahtzee's act]]. While they may not have known that Brooker had been doing the [[Deadpan Snarker|snarky]]-[[The Mean Brit|British]]-[[Accentuate the Negative|slating]] thing for a while, or that ''Screenburn'' and probably ''[[Screenwipe]]'' predate ''[[Zero Punctuation]]'', it just sounds dumb given that Yahtzee has credited Brooker as an influence on his ZP style.

* Who first turned "it stinks" into a [[Catch Phrase]], [[The Critic|Jay Sherman]], or [[Mystery Science Theater 3000|Joel Robinson]] riffing on that guy from ''[[Pod People]]''? Kolenkhov from ''[[You Can't Take It With You]]'' beat both of them by several decades.

* [[The Internet]] itself is older than most people think. Most people would not have heard of it before the mid-1990s, and thus assume that was roughly the time it came about. The World Wide Web dates from 1991, but it is actually just one of many applications built on top of the actual Internet. Unfortunately, an exact date for the birth of the Internet cannot be given, since it was a continuous development over several decades. Some years which may be considered candidates for this include:

* While the United States might be the first country/empire/kingdom to celebrate and proudly admit to being a melting pot, this has been going on since the rise of city-states albiet on a less global scale. The city of Rome itself was founded by runaway slaves and criminals from all over the Italian peninsula and as the Roman Republic and Roman Empire expanded it added Etruscan, Carthaginian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian blood to the mix.

** [[Cyrus the Great]] in the 6th Century BC enthusiastically encouraged multiculturalism throughout the empire he founded, the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

* Based on comments on [[YouTube]] on the Max Headroom Incident, you'd think that the idea of trolling on the internet is only about 15 years old and that the internet was invented around 1994 (see above for details). Truth is, it dates back to the late 80s at the very least, but back then it was an initiation process for newbies where someone would ask a question everyone knew the answer to for purpose of weeding out the newbies and only the newbies would answer, it was called "trolling for newbies". [[Snopes]] is someone who participated in this early form of trolling. However, the direct ancestor to what's known as trolling today dates back even further, to at least the late 70s, but until the term "trolling" evolved, these people were known as "griefers". Evidence of this behaviour can be found as early as 1981 on Google Groups archives of Usenet.

* A couple of examples from the automotive industry:

* [[Hieronymus Bosch]] and [[Pieter Bruegel the Elder]] made a number of very interesting [[Surrealism|surrealist]] paintings... roughly 400 years before the surrealist movement appeared.

* The term "electric blue" dates back at least as far as 1884 (according to [[The Other Wiki]]), and appears in a [[Sherlock Holmes]] story ("The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", pub. 1892).

* Likewise, remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels were not invented by Hollywood. It was common practice in ancient Greece and in 17th century France among classical authors to base their plays on well-known episodes of the Trojan war or to write their own version of the existing work of a more ancient author. Moliere's ''The Miser'', for instance, is a remake of a latin play, ''Aulularia'', by Plautus, with some dialogues lifted almost verbatim! The public wanted to see how a new author was going to use the subject material; it didn't matter that the later was not new.

* The term "wormhole" first appeared in Shakespeare's works!