Children mark each year by the number of teeth lost, knees skinned, centimetres grown. For teens, it’s more about memes, crushes, exam crams. Yet live a few more years and the seasons overlap, the years blur: which is where words can help.

If I say Princess Diana, you’ll recall the day you heard the news. Same for tsunami, or Cathy Freeman’s run in Sydney. Big news stories can preserve a moment, with related words a close second. Potentially. There’s no guarantee to this lexical retrieval method since one supermoon will morph into another supermoon if you live enough nights. Ditto for Wimbledon winners, Oscar movies, prime ministers. So-called momentous events can lose their notch on the timeline.

Sydney’s Sweeney’s American Eagle Outfitters ad saw a spike in searches for the word “eugenic”.

Unless you have a wordy bent, a trick I’ve realised while rummaging the look-up lists in the Merriam-Webster archives. Banked for posterity are the nouns........

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