Recency Illusion: Why Things You Just Noticed Feel Brand New

The illusion is a sampling error about your own attention. You can only date a thing from when you started noticing it, and noticing has a start date of its own: a word becomes salient because a friend used it, a column complained about it, or you moved somewhere it is common. From the inside, the moment of noticing feels like the moment of arrival. Zwicky called this a selective attention effect, and paired it with its companion, the frequency illusion: once you have noticed something you also think it happens all the time, because you now catch nearly every occurrence. The two travel together, and together they produce the familiar conviction that some usage is both new and everywhere.

Language is where the illusion is most studied because language is where it is most often checked. Dictionaries record first citations, and the record is humbling. Singular they, now blamed on the last decade, is in a romance from about 1375. The emphatic literally that annoys so many readers was in a novel of 1769. OK was a Boston newspaper joke in 1839, OMG was an admiral's joke to Winston Churchill in 1917, and fake news was a newspaper headline in 1890. Zwicky's own 2005 post made the point with a usage column that dated between you and I to about 20 years earlier: the construction had been common for at least 150 years and was in Shakespeare. Anne Curzan's 2014 history of prescriptivism shows that the pattern itself is old; complaints about new corruptions of English recur in every generation, often about forms that the previous generation's complainers also thought were new.

The illusion has a social edge. Zwicky added a third illusion in a later post, that the young are the source of whatever is new, and the three combine into the kids-these-days complaint: a form you have just noticed, that seems to be everywhere, and that must have come from teenagers. Alexandra D'Arcy's 2017 history of like traces that one word's discourse uses back about 800 years, a long way from the 1980s. None of this means nothing is new; it means that the feeling of newness is evidence about you, not about the word. The recency illusion is a named observation rather than a measured effect: no experiment estimates how often people make the error or by how much, and the demo illustrates the gap between felt and recorded dates on ten cases where the record is clear.

The recency illusion has no original experiment. It has an original post. On August 7, 2005, the Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky published "Just between Dr. Language and I" on Language Log, the group blog of academic linguists. The occasion was a column by a self-styled language authority claiming that between you and I had begun about 20 years earlier, when young Americans drilled to say "my friend and I" started using I everywhere. Zwicky's reply was that a quick trip to the Oxford English Dictionary and to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage would have shown a longer history: the rise of the construction in late modern English goes back at least 150 or 160 years, and earlier uses go back about 400, including Antonio's letter in The Merchant of Venice, "all debts are cleared between you and I."

He then named the error. "We have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts." He listed other cases, sentence-adverb hopefully and split infinitives among them, and noted that linguists are not immune: Charles Hockett had called a construction recent in 1958 that was attested about 30 years earlier. In the same post he named the frequency illusion, and in a follow-up the adolescent illusion. The Oxford English Dictionary added both recency illusion and frequency illusion as entries in 2019, with Zwicky's 2005 post as the earliest evidence for each.

The dates in the demo come from the published record rather than from any study. The OED's blog carries Dennis Baron's account of singular they from about 1375, and its entries give 1659 for the verb unfriend, 1769 for emphatic literally, 1839 for OK, 1917 for OMG and 1962 for woke in its figurative sense. Merriam-Webster traced fake news to the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune of June 1890. Green's Dictionary of Slang gives 1811 for hang out, and D'Arcy's history cites the 1778 novel Evelina for like as a parenthetical. The Merchant of Venice was written in the late 1590s.

The rows below are illustrations, not findings from the studies cited on this page.

Zwicky's own remedy is the whole of it: your impressions are not to be trusted, so check the facts. A few habits make that automatic.

• Look it up before you date it. Dictionaries with dated citations, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, record first uses, and corpus tools show frequency over time.
• Separate two dates. When did this thing first appear, and when did you first notice it? Only the second is available from the inside, and it is the wrong one.
• Ask what changed in your exposure. A new job, a new city or a column that complained about the usage can start the noticing without anything starting in the language.
• Expect the frequency illusion alongside. If something feels both new and everywhere, treat the second feeling as suspect too, and look for the misses: the conversations in which the form did not appear.
• Be careful with the young. The adolescent illusion rides along with the recency illusion; many forms attributed to teenagers were in use before their grandparents were born.

The recency illusion is about how old a thing is. Its neighbors are about how common it is, how good the past was and how good the new is.

• It is not the frequency illusion, Zwicky's other coinage from the same 2005 post, the belief that something you have just noticed is now everywhere. The frequency illusion concerns how common a thing seems; the recency illusion concerns how new it seems. That page treats the attention mechanism in depth; this one treats the dating error.
• It is not the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, the popular name for the frequency illusion, which covers the experience of a word turning up everywhere after you learn it rather than any belief about its age.
• It is not declinism, the belief that things are getting worse. The two often appear in the same complaint, a new corruption of a language that used to be pure, but declinism is a judgment of direction and the recency illusion a mistake about dates.
• It is not the appeal to novelty, the assumption that newer is better. That assumption needs no wrong date: its error is the step from new to good, while the recency illusion misdates the thing itself.