--- title: "Vidiot!": 7 Words That Are Way Older Than You Thought description: There have, apparently, been "sexperts" since Calvin Coolidge was in office canonical: https://time.com/74838/you-vidiot-7-words-that-are-older-than-you-thought/ author: Katy Steinmetz article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-04-24T02:38:12.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:55:11.176Z og:title: "Vidiot!": 7 Words That Are Way Older Than You Thought og:description: There have, apparently, been "sexperts" since Calvin Coolidge was in office og:url: https://time.com/74838/you-vidiot-7-words-that-are-older-than-you-thought/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd97234cbd711e46d/69868c2d810bbb3cc0c91362/screen-shot-2014-04-23-at-12-24-11-pm.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1278 og:image:height: 719 og:image:alt: Vidiot og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: "Vidiot!": 7 Words That Are Way Older Than You Thought twitter:description: There have, apparently, been "sexperts" since Calvin Coolidge was in office twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd97234cbd711e46d/69868c2d810bbb3cc0c91362/screen-shot-2014-04-23-at-12-24-11-pm.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 'You Vidiot!': 7 Words That Are Older Than You Thought > Sponsored content. 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Worth Your Time is TIME's culture newsletter, published Tuesdays and Saturdays to 40,000 subscribers as of August 2026. #### Who writes TIME's culture recommendations? Culture editor Eliza Berman writes Worth Your Time, drawing on TIME's critics and culture desk. #### Is Worth Your Time free? Yes. It is a free newsletter available at time.com/newsletters. by [Katy Steinmetz](https://time.com/author/katy-steinmetz/) ## Katy Steinmetz Apr 24, 2014 2:38 AM UTC  A screen shot of the front page of the New York Post from April 23, 2014. by [Katy Steinmetz](https://time.com/author/katy-steinmetz/) ## Katy Steinmetz Apr 24, 2014 2:38 AM UTC On Wednesday, the New York _Post_ ran a giant, one-word headline, as they so often do: “VIDIOT!” A young man from Long Beach, N.Y., bitter from losing a video game to another teenage boy, made a prank call to the police, pretending to be his gaming rival and saying he had just killed his own mother and brother. Authorities then launched a SWAT-team style response including helicopters. To reach for record-breaking understatement—yikes. There is no doubt that the _Post_ was trying to get across the fact that the kid who made the tasteless joke call is an video game-playing idiot, hence _vidiot_. But this word has been around longer [than video games have](http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,2029221,00.html). In a 1959 issue of LIFE, an advertisement jokingly defines a _vidiot_ as “a person who pays a NEW price for a REBUILT TV picture tube!” Aside from being a reminder that we should all start calling our TVs picture tubes again, this is a testament to the staying power of what might seem like a cheesy novelty word. And this isn’t the only such fusion word that has stood the test of time. Fusion words_,_ or as Lewis Carroll called them, portmanteaus, are words that squish together portions of two separate words to create a single word with a new, combined meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word **_vidiot_** back to 1949 and defines one as “a habitual, undiscriminating viewer of television or player of video games,” a cousin to the lifeless couch potato. Here are six other portmanteaus that may be older than they seem, with dates taken from earliest citations in the OED: **advertorial (advertisement + editorial) n., 1914:** _An advertisement or publication giving information about a product or service in the style of an editorial or objective report_. This word has been around for at least 100 years, dating back to a time when people said things like “women folk” without a tongue in their cheek. **bullsh\*t (bull + sh\*t) n., 1915:** _rubbish, nonsense_. The more upbeat _hot sh\*t_, by contrast, wasn’t en vogue until the 1940s. _Dipsh\*t_ started making appearances in the 1960s, about the same time as the sarcastic _No sh\*t, Sherlock_. And _batsh\*t crazy,_ an adjective today used to describe unfortunate ex-girlfriends, took off in the 1990s. **frenemy (friend + enemy) n., 1953**: _a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry_. This may sound like something that has only been central to pop culture since Lindsay Lohan played a mean girl, but people have been saying _frenemy_ since Dina Lohan was just a twinkle in Grandpa Lohan’s eye. **mockumentary (mock + documentary) n., 1965**: _a film, television program, etc., which adopts the form of a serious documentary in order to satirize its subject._ This word was taking it up to 11 for nearly 20 years before Rob Reiner put out _This Is Spinal Tap_. **netiquette (Internet + etiquette) n., 1982**: _an informal code of practice regulating the behavior of Internet users_. In 1992, less than 20% of U.S. households [had a computer](http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20086/1/Give%5FPC's%5Fa%5FChance%5FPersonal%5FComputer%5FOwnership%5Fand%5Fthe%5FDigital%5FDivide%5Fin%5Fthe%5FUnited%5FStates%5Fand%5FGreat%5FBritain.pdf), and yet the early adopters were already using cloying phrases a decade before that. One simply can’t keep up. **sexpert (sex + expert) n., 1924:** _An expert in sex (in various senses of the noun); esp. a person who advises on sexual relations, techniques, etc._ One can only imagine what “sexual techniques” these sexperts could discuss in polite company in the 1920s. The lost art of heavy hand-holding, perhaps. _This is an edition of Wednesday Words, a weekly feature on language. For the previous post,_ [_click here_](http://time.com/64493/sat-vocabulary/)_._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/74838/you-vidiot-7-words-that-are-older-than-you-thought/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/74838/you-vidiot-7-words-that-are-older-than-you-thought/"},"headline":"'You Vidiot!': 7 Words That Are Older Than You Thought","datePublished":"2014-04-24T02:38:12.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:55:11.176Z","description":"There have, apparently, been \"sexperts\" since Calvin Coolidge was in office","url":"https://time.com/74838/you-vidiot-7-words-that-are-older-than-you-thought/","keywords":["Living","Culture"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd97234cbd711e46d/69868c2d810bbb3cc0c91362/screen-shot-2014-04-23-at-12-24-11-pm.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Katy Steinmetz","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/katy-steinmetz/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd97234cbd711e46d/69868c2d810bbb3cc0c91362/screen-shot-2014-04-23-at-12-24-11-pm.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Vidiot","caption":"","creditText":"A screen shot of the front page of the New York Post from April 23, 2014.","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-living/","name":"Living"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/74838/you-vidiot-7-words-that-are-older-than-you-thought/","name":"'You Vidiot!': 7 Words That Are Older Than You Thought"}}]}] ```