The term recency illusion was coined in 2005 by American linguist Arnold Zwicky. It in fact belongs to an entire taxonomy of linguistic illusions, including its antithesis, the antiquity illusion, which refers to the belief that a word, meaning, grammatical construction, etc. that you’re familiar with has been used for a long time, when in fact it was only coined recently. Other illusions include the adolescent illusion, the (mistaken) belief that young people are responsible for what some consider to be ‘undesirable’ language trends (e.g. text speak and abbreviations, associated with teenagers but in fact used by texting and e-mailing adults of all ages) and the frequency illusion, the idea that, once you know of a particular linguistic phenomenon, you decide that it occurs a lot, but that’s just because you happen to notice it more readily and are therefore tricked into believing that it’s particularly frequent. Zwicky claims that such illusions are the effect of what he refers to as selective attention, positing a general theory based on what you, as an individual, happen to have noticed.