What is a cottar, a gleaner, a drover? These words were common before the first industrial revolution, but now their meaning is lost or has shifted to something else.

Instead, new words were created for the changes that the steam engine brought, and the old were discarded. The cottar, a peasant who could use a cottage and a small plot in exchange for serving a master, was expelled from the land, to the factories, where they worked long, harrowing hours at the steam-powered looms.

The new word for the cottar was “millhand”, toiling under the whip of newly fashioned profession of “timekeeper”, themselves ever on the lookout for “sabotage”, which was the term for disruption done by those revolting against the industrialists for taking their jobs. Called “Luddites” after the fictional figurehead Ned Ludd.

In turn, the second industrial revolution, powered by the newfound art of electrical engineering, brought us the words “assembly line”, “shift work”, and “alienation”, which is the removal of all joy in your job.

And before the fifties, who knew what a “mainframe” was, and that a “bit” could mean something other than a small amount?

The first Industrial Revolution and the second, the information age and the internet, all have brought on new ideas and new words to describe them.

Other words go into decline or change their meanings. You can google the Gaelic word for storyteller, “seanchai”: a traditional Irish storyteller and historian who passes down the "seanchas” through oral storytelling. Fine, but as we scroll through TikTok videos about the subject, we might be worried that they’re “deepfakes”, or “misinformation”, “fake news”.

At work, we share “prompts”, are worried about “hallucinations” and “bias drift”, as we have AI produce content for our “ghostwriting” assignments.

Every revolution builds on the previous and each shift takes us to new places in our minds. In our individual minds, in our collective minds. A generation grows up the pre-industrial extended family of agrarians; the next in the squalor of cramped and polluted steam-powered industry towns. A century later in the factory cities where children toil, their homes without plumbing and without the electricity that power the Ford factories where they work; half a century later, husbands take their Ford to the office in hat, suit and tie, leaving bored suburban wives to watch daytime TV and their children at school. We need new words at every step.

The past is in the internet where we look up words we no longer use, but we can't retrieve the unconscious lived reality of actual human beings from yesteryear. Living “off-grid” might give you that illusion, but your children growing up in your forest home can step out at any point and rejoin the 21st century.

"Cottar" is a word that My AI gave me, while I was on my phone.

Is chatgpt a verb already? To chatgpt? Can I say, I’ve chatgpted it? Not yet? Tomorrow?