nerdsnipe
The term nerdsnipe originates from a 2007 xkcd webcomic, perhaps inspired by a real-life anecdote from John Conway, the inventor of Conway’s Game of Life. As with all xkcd webcomics, additional background information can be found at its associated explainxkcd article: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/356:_Nerd_Sniping
One thing I appreciate about the term is that it’s a microcosm of how English compound words are created. In the originating comic it’s spelled “nerd snipe”. Three years later, the same author spells it “nerd-snipe”. I don’t have a good date on the unhyphenated version, but I can see that I was using the spelling “nerdsnipe” by at least 2018. One interesting point of comparison is when news outlets and style guides started dropping the hyphen in “email”, and extrapolating that most people probably started dropping it a few years before that.
okay
Doing silly things with language transcends time. Today we say smol and chonky, while in 1830s NYC there was a thing around misspelled abbreviations, like K.Y. for “no use” (know yuse) and N.C. for “enough said” (nuff ced). One that got popularized in 1839 was O.K. for “all correct” (oll korrect), which gradually rose to national prominence through use in a presidential campaign and the need for a quick way to write “looks good” on the gradually increasing volume of paperwork.
In 1929 - ninety years later! - the alternative spelling okay began displacing the original initialism. Quite some time after that, okay was such a common word that it got abbreviated again to k in text messages.
podcast
The term podcast was first used in a 2004 Guardian article, as a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast”. An iPod was a portable music player that only played music in digital formats, typically mp3 or aac, rather than relying on CDs or other physical media. This allowed them to be lightweight and compact in comparison. They were in production from 2001-2022.
guy
The term guy referring to a (typically male) generic person goes back to 1847. This was a generalization from an its earlier usage meaning “bizarrely dressed person” (1836), which was in turn generalized from its earlier usage meaning “effigy of Guy Fawkes to be burned” (1806).
Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) has effigies that were regularly burned because he had hidden enough gunpowder to blow up the entire House of Lords and assassinate King James I on site before he was discovered on November 4, 1605. For the next four hundred years people have celebrated Gunpowder Treason Day, later renamed Guy Fawkes Night, on November 5, burning an effigy of him in remembrance.
In conclusion, if you would like your name to be used as a synonym of “man” in 300 years, you could do worse than trying to blow up the House of Lords, as long as you don’t mind the annual burnings of you in effigy.
escalate
The verb escalate starts appearing in 1959 as a metaphor for an increasingly mutually destructive nuclear war. It was derived from the trademarked Escalator, named in 1900 shortly after its invention. The name Escalator, in turn, was made up to suggest the complementary elevator, where -scala- is “ladder” in Latin (-levare- is “lift”, but “elevate” was an English word already).