The recency illusion is the belief or impression, on the part of someone who has only recently become aware of a long-established phenomenon, that the phenomenon itself must be of recent origin. The term was coined by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University who is primarily interested in examples involving words, meanings, phrases, and grammatical constructions. However, use of the term is not restricted to linguistic phenomena: Zwicky has defined it simply as, "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent".