English word teachings as a window into how everyday life changed

For the Pudding, Jasmine Nackash compared the dictionary of essential words taught to English language learners in 1953 to the current dictionary updated in 2023. The word shift is a reflection of our surroundings:

In hindsight, the shift makes sense. By 1957, four years after the original list was published, white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar for the first time in US history. And by 2000, fewer than one in four workers did manual labor. The stuff people encountered in their daily lives, what they needed to talk about, and the systems they had to navigate all changed.

The vocabulary lists, built from the language of their respective eras, tracked those changes. The shifts reflect a life that moved further from its own making: less tied to tools, animals, food, and the body; more tied to national or global institutions, categories, systems, and ideas.

An alluvial diagram is used to show the changes in the kind of words taught between the comparison years. Words flow from left to right within each band. I like it.