Doctor Who has changed the English language
Over the years, the Oxford English Dictionary has made space between its august e-covers for several Whoisms. 'Dalek' (now sometimes 'used allusively', the OED informs us) was the first one; it's a word Terry Nation claimed to have made up on the spot, only later discovering that it meant 'far-off' in Serbo-Croat. 'TARDIS' also has an entry, which explains with majestic sobriety the acronym from Time and Relative Dimensions in Space before embarking on an exhaustive definition of the word's extended significations: 'A thing which has a larger capacity than its outward appearance suggests; a building, etc, that is larger on the inside than it appears on the outside; b) a thing seemingly from another time (past or future)'.
It has sometimes been argued that the Cybermen (first appearance 1966) gave the world the 'cyber-' prefix to denote futuristic technology, though OED doesn't buy that, dating cybernetics from 1948 ('the theory or study of communication and control in living organisms or machines') and cyborg (cybernetic+organism) from 1960. Poor Cybermat, it tried so hard.
The series also gifted to the British language in perpetuo the phrase 'hiding behind the sofa' as an expression of TV-induced fear. Whoever coined it, the formula is now inextricably linked to the Doctor (and the appearance of the Daleks), lending its name to a book of celebrity recollections of the series as well as a fallback headline for hacks everywhere. Even Prince Andrew has admitted to hiding from the Daleks behind the soft furnishings as a kid in Windsor Castle.
