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What's something (opinion/sentiment, problem, culture, type of content) that has been present for longer than people might expect?
A political example might be the fact that according to gallup, people have supported a popular vote for the US presidency for more than 75 years (this article is 20 years old, but the numbers still stand), albeit the partisan difference in opinion seems to be more recent and it's not clear if people knew what to replace it, or if they knew about all the other faults in the US political system.
Other more cultural examples might be things like romans drawing dicks on Hadrian's wall, eating fast food and their timeless graffiti, surrealism being 100 years old as opposed to 'Zoomer humor', etc.
So, what are your examples?
LGBT people often get treated as some new invention of humanity, in particular by people who believe that our existence is a corruption of an otherwise rigidly cis and hetero society/biology, but such a view is essentially a prejudicial retcon. It’s also buttressed by the fact that stigmas often prevent our stories from entering into the historical record and mass conceptions of society, so some people believe we are “new” just because they have been presented with imbalanced representations from the past that have excluded us.
While it’s true we can’t and shouldn’t assign modern identities to historical figures, we can examine behaviors and self-disclosure and see that there are people who have been living lives that mirror modern LGBT identities for a long, long time.
One of my personal favorites is the Public Universal Friend, a genderless preacher from the 1700s. For anyone who thinks a non-binary identity or having preferred pronouns is a new, modern trend in self-identification:
When talking with people, I'm always surprised how few know how old modern architecture is. I'm no expert on the subject, but it began around 1900 and became more widespread in the 1920s and 30s in Europe and North America. I guess simple forms and surfaces seem anachronistic to many people when they think about that long ago!
As an adendum to this: I play on a Minecraft server that has a city with an America 1920s theme - golden age and all that, but no real modern buildings, as far as I saw. I asked why and got the answer "it wouldn't fit the theme". I think that's a shame, really.
Without dates or closer inspection of them, I'd absolutely believe every one of those example buildings in the International Style subsection (and a lot of the others) were built within the past decade. Kind of mindblowing when even most of the surviving architecture of my area (and the others I've spent significant time in with structures from that time) from that time is mostly Art Deco and not much else.
Socrates, ca. ~400BC.
I've never actually been able to verify that he said that at any point, so I decided to try and look again and this time found this: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
What a neat website.
How old some linguistic trends are. The figurative "literally" can be dated all the way back to usage by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, while the singular (but gender neutral) "they" can be found in Shakespeare, but both (mostly literally) are often attributed to be a "millennial" thing, despite actually being hundreds of years old.
I wasn't aware some people are trying to make a fuss about "singular they" until recently. When I first heard someone complaining about it, I was taken aback. In every book I've read since then, I made sure to notice singular they to see if it is or isn't a thing in decades past (the oldest book I read being Dune from the 1960s), and yeah, it was present in all I read.
Adding to your points, "ain't" is also a few centuries old! Its use has always been stigmatized, I believe...
Isn't "ain't" just slang?
EDIT: Ignore what I said, I don't know anything.
I'm no linguist and no expert, but what's "just slang" and what's "a real word"? I think its use and meaning is fairly concretely defined, but the stigma persists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t#Proscription_and_stigma
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ain't
Two links I just read through that I believe are worth posting!
Language is fake. We made it all up and constantly decide what's a "real" word and what isn't. Today's slang is tomorrow's lexicon.*
*This is semi-tongue-in-cheek and a huge oversimplification.
It's a contraction, just like "isn't".
Life in cities. Çatalhöyük was a small proto-city of about 5,000 people existing in 7000 BC. To put that in perspective when the Great Pyramids were first undergoing construction, Çatalhöyük was about as ancient to the builders as the builders are to us to us today.
The idea that older cultures, customs, etc are necessarily superior and pure and must be defended against innovations mostly introduced by younger generations.