The Cold War is heating up, computing is taking off, and strange foods are sweeping across America

Surprised wank is so recent, even if just in written form.

I’m not that surprised. Sexual words rarely appear in published works prior to WWII. Even slang dictionaries tend to shy away from them. (There are some exceptions, like Farmer and Henley, that revel in such sexual slang, but these are comparatively rare.)

aka, adv. The abbreviation for also known as appears in 1948.

I’ve antedated it by a year: the 1947 Catalog Of Copyright Entries (p. 80) has “aka — also known as.”

idiolect, n. Linguist Bernard Bloch coined this term for an individual’s peculiar linguistic system in 1948.

While that sense of peculiar does exist, it is hardly prominent, and the word here is actively misleading; how about particular or personal?

swart gevaar, n. Afrikaans for “black peril,” racial fears drove South Africa into a policy of apartheid and this term into the English lexicon.

If you say so, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.  Was it used (without a following translation) outside of South Africa?

What an interesting year. I doubt if all participants in this forum were already alive in that year (I certainly was - probably more alive than I am now ;-). Events such as the deaths of Orville Wright and General Pershing take us right back to the century before last, when Pershing fought in the Indian wars, and Wright was getting ready to build the world’s first real aeroplane. One is reminded very strongly that history is a continuum.....

lepton

Physicists didn’t coin this name, they borrowed it. The name “Lepton” has been around for about 3000 years, mostly applied to very small units of currency (e.g. the New Testament “widow’s mite” [Luke 21: 1-4], or the present day Eurocent in Greece): numismatists use it all the time.

wank

the one-piece, neck-to-ankle, electrically heated, zip-up undergarments worn by RAF aircrew in WW2 were colloquially referred to as “anti-wanking suits”.

Thanks. I’ve made the appropriate corrections.

Inclusion of swart gevaar was a stretch, but I wanted to get a term associated with apartheid into the entry for 1948.