Do it yourself

Some folks are just getting introduced to “DIY,” which can make it feel really new. But, like many things that feel new to us in language, it’s older than you might think.

The phrase “do it yourself” goes back to about 1910, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It starts as an adjective: a “do-it-yourself project” or a “do-it-yourself model.” By the 1950s it also has become a noun. So one could say, “I’m a big fan of ‘do it yourself.'”

In the early 1950s we begin to see the initialism “DIY” show up. (As I said, it’s older than you might think.) “DIY” comes into the language as both an adjective and a noun. For example, the OED has a quote describing a new Black & Decker product as “popularizing DIY.”

I did a search of Google Books using the Ngram Viewer and found that “do it yourself,” as a phrase, takes off in the language in the 1950s. Then in the 1970s “DIY” suddenly hits the books and we see a dramatic increase in usage, and the phrase “do it yourself” starts to decline. “Do it yourself,” as a phrase, is still more popular than “DIY,” but “DIY” is certainly out there, and I think a lot of people are now coming into contact with it through websites like Pinterest and Reddit.

Too much information?

Now, “TMI” may feel new, and it actually is new.

“TMI” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009 and the OED editors cite it back to 1996 as an initialism for “too much information.”

I quite like “TMI,” and I think it benefits from being accompanied by an appropriate facial expression — it usually expresses disapproval or disgust — or a hand motion indicating “stop,” because you’re really trying to stop someone from sharing what they’ve already shared, and might be about to continue to share.

It’s worth noting that acronyms and initialisms are a relatively modern phenomenon in the English language. The key difference between them is that with acronyms we take the first letter of each word in a phrase and say them as a word. Take “SCUBA,” for instance, which stands for “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.” With initialisms like “TMI,” on the other hand, we take the first letter of each word and still say them as letters. (Think “FYI,” an initialism for “for your information,” which goes back to 1941.)

In the long run, some of these new acronyms and initialisms will stick, and some won’t. But I’m rooting for both “DIY” and “TMI.”

This video appears courtesy of LSA Today.