6 Millennial Fads That Are Way Older Than You Think

Take this 17th-century portrait of a lady preparing food while a black servant gives her an expression that seems to ask "Why are your boobs out?" The woman in the picture is Nell Gwyn, comedic actress and mistress to English King Charles II, who sent this lusty portrait to her lover sometime during their 16-year affair. The very suggestive piece shows a virginal white Gwyn flash ample cleavage while "stuffing sausages," which we'll assume was the Renaissance equivalent of sending the eggplant emoji. The original picture, made by a wisely anonymous painter in the late 17th century, is only a little larger than a postcard -- not big enough to hang on a wall, but probably just about the right size to carry around in a king-sized pocket and show to his ducal bros.

Flash-forward to 1828, and this self-portrait by Boston painter Sarah Goodridge might be the first sext selfie. And unlike Gwyn, Goodridge knew there was a quicker way into a man's unmentionables than some subtle iconography:

She sent this as a gift to none other than U.S. senator Daniel Webster. It's a miniature painting, measuring around 2x3 inches, which was popular at the time. Pretty useless for display, but handy for, say, keeping it hidden from your wife. Webster and Goodridge insisted they were only close friends, and historians have found no evidence they were doing the wild thing. Except, of course, for exhibit Double D.

Naturally, when cameras came along, sexting became a lot easier. The media already knew about the trend as early as 1860, warning ladies against the improper behavior of "giving daguerreotypes of themselves to young men who are merely acquaintances."

And during the early 1900s, it was common for women to send racy pictures of themselves to their husbands on the battlefield to show them what was waiting at home (a very blurry half-dressed woman). There are plenty of attics everywhere that might contain such saucy pictures in a dusty box, claims English Professor Joshua Adair -- a fact that he likes to illustrate to his horrified students by showing them a photo he found of his pantsless grandmother.

Of course, selfies themselves started around five minutes after the camera was invented. But surely, selfie sticks had to wait until cameras got tiny or people's biceps got massive, right? That's why the selfie stick only officially dates back to around 2005. But when BBC News mentioned this in a column recently, it prompted one reader, Alan Cleaver, to send them this photo of his grandparents from 1925:

The dashing gentleman in the pictograph is Arnold Hogg, simultaneously using the earliest known selfie stick and conveniently providing photographic evidence of it. Unfortunately, the context of this image has been lost to time, but if you look at the picture, it's quite obvious that that's the face of a guy who just invented the selfie stick, while the expression on his wife's face is definitely that of a woman who just realized she married the inventor of the selfie stick.

And that's probably the same complaint that people had when everyone started doing it back in the 1870s.

Back before the telephone, there was the telegraph, which you might liken to an early form of SMS. You'd write a short message and pay your local operator to tap it out in Morse code to your chosen recipient. But telegraphy was expensive, and it charged by the letter, meaning eloquence could easily cost you an entire week's salary in the nickel mines. As a penny-pinching response, people derived a shorthand language that looks remarkably similar to the kind of text speak that Baby Boomers complain about today, as you can see from this 1901 textbook:

In fact, a lot of accursed Millennial speak can be traced directly to the abbreviations used by fast-tapping telegraphers. Most notably, the letter "U" for "you" or "R" for "are." Telegraphers also used "ty" for "thank you" and "pls" for "please." And though they didn't say "LOL," they would indicate laughter with "HI HI" (which required fewer dots than either HA HA or HE HE).

Maybe the most surprising acronym to come out of this era is "OMG," which has been traced as far back as a letter from Admiral John Fisher to Winston Churchill in 1917:

The biographers of Lewis Carroll, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Virginia Woolf all also claimed that their respective subjects cranked out their books on their feet. In 1888, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche even snapped at the novelist Gustave Flaubert, who claimed, "One cannot think and write except when seated," by saying, "The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value." Which is kind of the 19th-century version of what an obnoxious Millennial would say to their manager while slurping on a pumpkin spice Frappuccino.

Of course, before standing desks were popular enough to be mass-produced, most people were forced to jury-rig them. Here's a photo of Winston Churchill working at a desk that looks to have been propped up on some kind of cabinet:

Ernest Hemingway also improvised his own standing desk by putting his typewriter on top of a bookcase, claiming, "Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up."

Then there's this photo of 30-year-old Marvel Comics co-founder Stan Lee (yes, he was young once), who made a standing desk out of a bench on top of a table so that he could write not only standing up, but also outside and shirtless. As he claimed: "Always wrote standing up -- good for the figure -- and always faced the sun -- good for the suntan!"

In 1962, the JFK Coloring Book became the first coloring book to hit the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed there for 14 whole weeks. It contained 22 pages of mockery aimed at the Kennedy administration, with instructions to paint Kennedy "red, white and blue," and to color the noses of his staff "burnt umber." It's nice to see that conservative humor hasn't lost any of its staleness today.

The John Birch Society Coloring Book made fun of a prominent '60s conspiracy theory group (kind of the Infowars of the Cold War):

Jokingly, it even contained one totally blank page, with the caption "How many Communists can you find in this picture? I can find 11. It takes practice."

Those two hipster assholes are Nora Hildebrandt and Maud Wagner, a couple of circus performers from the late 1800s who became well-known for their elaborate body art. But the controversy around these colorful women didn't end at their tats. They caused quite a scandal when, in order to display every inch of their art, they would lift up their petticoats to show them. Leave it to the Victorian Era to be more disturbed by a bare thigh than a full-body tattoo.

But are tattoos really the most shocking thing 19th-century ladies could stab onto their bodies? Not even close. That honor goes to the Victorian nipple rings. While historians find it difficult to properly research things like Victorian peachrangs due to the intimacy and secrecy involved, some European medical journals have been uncovered that reference their female patients' nipple jewelry as far back as 1857. Sometimes they were even connected by chains, because your great-great-grandma was much more hardcore than you will ever be. Some women thought that the procedure allowed them to develop bigger, rounder, firmer breasts due to the "constant excitation of the nerves caused by the rings." And if you were a woman in the 1800s, excitation of the nerves was in short supply.

So what about the dudes? Surely, Victorian men wouldn't dream of getting something as metal as a dick piercings? Well, not only did they consider them fashionable, but even a sign of modesty. You see, another fashion fad of the mid-19th century was incredibly tight-fitting pants -- so tight that they left very little to the imagination. To better tuck their little sinners away from God-fearing eyes, well-off men would anchor their enormous Pride And Prejudice penises with a rod of metal (later called a "Prince Albert") inside their pants to not fluster any godly women. So if you're ever feeling insecure, take a moment to remember that your great-granddad probably had to use a barbell to secure his titanic manhood under his trousers. You won't thank us later.

S Peter Davis is the creator of the Three Minute Philosophy YouTube series, and is the author of the book Occam's Nightmare.

There's more to millennials than meets the eye. Check out The Millennial Dream for more.

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