I was just sitting here thinking how funny it is that a lot of online websites offer widgets that are actually existing, functional items. Add this widget to your website, blog, web browser, dashboard, or whatever else.
When I was in high school (which was less than a decade ago – I’m not that old, yet!) and when I took economics in college, widget was the term they used for fictitional products – products that didn’t exist. I think they’ll have to come up with a new economics term for that because I bet they’ll have people thinking of the electronic kinds of widgets when teachers/professors start talking widgets.
Or with the way the world online evolves so quickly, I’m sure someone will come up with a spiffy new term for widgets that’ll catch on and then everybody else will start calling it that too. I’m glad nobody’s thought to call these things e-gets (“E” jehts) because that kind of sounds like “idiots” the way some people say it (idjuts!).
I’m a bit older than you (I left school thirty years ago!) and one example that springs to mind is the word “gay” which still meant happy back then. It now of course is used in a completely different way.
Language is evolving all the time and we’d probably have trouble understanding the english of two or three hundred years ago.