Birthday words

The OED has a "birthday words" feature:

Do you know which words entered the English language around the same time you entered the world? Use our OED birthday word generator to find out! We’ve scoured the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to find words with a first known usage for each year from 1900 to 2004. Simply select the relevant decade and click on your birth year to discover a word which entered the English language that year.

Please note that the dates given for these words refer to the current first known usage of the word. The OED team is continuously researching the histories of words (something you may be able to help with), and it’s therefore possible that we will find an earlier sense of the words during our research.

It's been available since December of last year, but I just learned about it today.

The methods finds 15 words whose first known citation is from the month of my birth, and two words currently dated to the very day. The two true birthday words are disneyfied and superbabe. The other 13 from the same month are apartheid, Biro, Chloromycetin, decartel(l)ization, drinkie, geekery, mu-meson, overprescription, pi-meson, playtest, polyhedrosis, rem, and rep.

I wondered what counted as geekery back then  — I should have known that this was the a reference to the original meaning of geek as "A performer at a carnival or circus whose show consists of bizarre or grotesque acts, such as biting the head off a live animal". So at that time, geekery was "The bizarre or grotesque acts performed by a carnival or circus geek, regarded collectively". The birthday quotation was from Newsweek:

Only the most desperate dipsomaniac would take a job as a geek, but this is all right with the carnival manager, because the worse the man looks, the less make-up he needs for his geekery.

The modern meaning of geek doesn't show up until 1984, according to the OED.

Playtest is a transitive verb meaning "To test through play the quality, safety, or marketability of". Polyhedrosis, in case you were wondering, turns out to be "A fatal disease of caterpillars characterized by the presence of polyhedral virus particles". And that's rep in the sense "roentgen equivalent physical", not the clipping of representative.

Of course, the internet giveth and the internet taketh away — a Google Books search turns up an instance of  "super babe" from 1945.

Anyhow, you can't use the OED's Birthday Words feature unless you're a subscriber — seems like a lost marketing opportunity. For X USD (or GBP or whatever) you could generate a link that would offer a nicely-formatted presentation of someone's Birthday Words.

But the returns tend to thin out in recent years:

YEAR October Words April Words 1927 19 22 1937 15 16 1947 15 9 1957 21 7 1967 6 22 1977 20 10 1987 8 10 1997 4 3 2007 0 0

Zeroing in on January and June words in the period 1990-2000:

YEAR January Words June Words 1990 11  3 1991 5  9 1992 3  13 1993 2  4 1994 5  9 1995 2  3 1996 8  4 1997 3  4 1998 2  0 1999 0  1 2000 0  1

Presumably this is not because the English language is slowing down in lexical innovation, but rather because it takes a while before a new coinage or borrowing gets its Word Induction Ceremony.  In any event, it means that an OED Birthday Words Portfolio would probably not be a good present for someone younger than 17 or so.