7 Words Georgians Used in the 1960s That Mean Something Different Today

Back in the 1960s, a Georgia catfish was just a fish with whiskers.

Words change, and if you grew up in Georgia then, you used the words in this article the old way.

Here’s what they meant back then, and what they mean now.

1. Spam

Spam meant a canned luncheon meat long before it landed in your inbox.

Hormel introduced it in 1937 to use up extra pork shoulder.

During World War II, Hormel shipped more than one million cans of Spam abroad to feed Allied troops and civilians.

The company made its eight billionth can in 2012, and Hawaiians still eat more than seven million cans a year.

Through the 1960s, if you said you were eating Spam, you usually meant the can.

If you saw a can labeled Spam back then, you were looking at lunch, not junk mail.

Not anymore.

Today, spam is the word for unsolicited commercial messages sent to many people at once, usually by email or text.

The first record of that meaning is from 1990, and the verb, as in to spam someone, followed in 1994.

The junk-mail sense borrowed its name from a skit on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, where chanting the word drowns out everything else.

2. Tweet

What did a tweet mean in the 1960s?

It meant a bird’s chirp, a sense recorded since 1837.

The verb, meaning to chirp, goes back to 1851, and the word imitates the sound it describes.

The post sense had to wait for Twitter, which didn’t launch until 2006.

If you had mentioned a tweet back then, your listener would have thought of a bird in a tree, not a phone screen.

Today, a tweet can be a post you make on X, the service once called Twitter, and the verb means to make that post.

3. Web

A spider’s work or the fabric coming off a loom: That’s what web meant in the 1960s.

The loom meaning dates to before the 12th century.

You couldn’t have gone on the web in 1969 since Tim Berners-Lee didn’t write his first proposal for the World Wide Web until March 1989.

The word also names the silk that insect larvae, such as tent caterpillars, spin into a nest or shelter, and the membrane joining fingers or toes.

Today, the web means the World Wide Web, the pages you reach when you go online.

4. Viral

In the 1960s, viral described something caused by a virus, a sense that dates to 1937.

You’d have said it about a cold or any other viral infection.

The word is built from virus plus the ending -al.

Now it describes anything that spreads quickly and widely, especially through social media, as with a viral video.

5. Rap

In 1960s slang, rap meant talking.

That meaning traces to Black American speech, with printed examples from 1969.

A 1969 article on the term described rapping as a fluent and lively way of talking.

If you'd had a long, free-flowing talk with a friend in 1969, you might have called it rapping.

Rap music came later, and Merriam-Webster defines it as rhythmic, usually rhyming speech chanted to musical accompaniment.

6. Troll

Troll had a few meanings in the 1960s.

One was a creature from Scandinavian folklore, and another was a way to fish.

To troll meant to trail a lure or baited hook from a moving boat.

The folklore creature dates to 1616, and the lure itself, also called a troll, dates to 1869.

Singing a round, with each voice coming in after the last, was another meaning.

If someone invited you to go trolling back then, you would have expected a boat and a fishing line, not a comment section.

Troll now names a person who deliberately antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory comments.

The online sense, first attested in the early 1990s, likely draws partly on the fishing sense and partly on the folklore creature.

7. Catfish

If you pulled a catfish from a river in the 1960s, the word meant a fish with whiskers, long before it meant a fake profile.

The fish is named for the whiskerlike barbels around its mouth.

The word dates to 1620, and the verb, meaning to fish for catfish, to 1871.

Online, a catfish is someone who sets up a false profile on a social networking site to mislead you.

As a verb, to catfish someone is to deceive them by creating a false profile online.