the corner office

This is interesting: the BBC has a list of 101 words in 101 years, listing when words first became common. Some, thankfully, didn't have much staying power (1909's tiddly-om-pom-pom, for example), and it's hard to imagine that people once lived without terms like sacred cow (1910), sex (in a copulative sense, 1929), dunk (1937) and pissed off (1943).

One technical term struck me as odd: the use of the word "applet" is dated to 1990. Java only arrived much later, but true enough, from Dictionary.com:

Merriam Webster "Collegiate Edition" gives a 1990 definition: a short application program especially for performing a simple specific task.

I can't remember whether I'd ever heard the term prior to Java, but there you go.