Even something as elemental as the weekend was brand-new. The term is not recorded in English before 1879, when it appears in the magazine Notes & Queries in the sentence: “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his weekend at So-and-so.” Even then, clearly, it only signified Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then only for certain people.
