This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here. You can tell a lot about a cultural moment by the words it invents. New phenomena, products, social movements, and moods require new language, and an idea without a name is unlikely to stick. The job of a dictionary is to be responsive—but not too reactive—to these trends, to catalog the new ways people are talking, which of course is the new ways they’re thinking. (Among others this year: generative AI, girlboss, meme stock, doomscroll.) Language conjures moments, but it also creates them. For about a decade starting in January 1987, this magazine’s back page belonged intermittently to Word Watch, a column by Anne H. Soukhanov. Soukhanov was then an editor of The American Heritage Dictionary, and Word Watch was a catalog of terms the dictionary’s editors were tracking for possible inclusion in upcoming editions, based on mentions in the press and pop culture—a sort of first …