A Few Definitions - Sort Of
All you need to do is start combing through Craigslist for mid-century modern stuff to discover there are all sorts of words used by all sorts of people to describe it.
Vintage is one of them:
How Do You Know If it is 'Vintage Collectible Memorabilia' ? - Associated Content
According to MWCD, it can be defined as "dating from the past" and its origin is Latin for grape gathering."Vintage" is also often used by folks to mean "less than a hundred years old," which certainly covers everything we might call mid-century modern.
When the word ‘vintage' appears on a price tag, in an antique environment, dealers predominantly mean: I don't know the date of this item, but I like it, and I like the word vintage.
Then there is "retro":
retro - Definitions from Dictionary.com
2. of or designating the style of an earlier time: retro clothes.In real life, a lot of advertisers use "retro" to mean a somewhat hazy period from the beginning of the mid-century period through the Pop of the seventies, and even some of the post-modern products of the eighties and nineties. A search through Craigslist on "retro" will, however, turn up quite a few mid-century items.
And, of course, "mid-century," and "mid-century modern." These are the most specific terms, especially the second. The first could," though doesn't often, mean the middle of some other century than the twentieth. The second will almost always mostly get you what you want, although the literal-minded seller will call anything manufactured between 1940 and 1960 "mid-century," even though is is banal borax (borax: a term referring to cheap, awful furniture manufactured and sold by the trainload during the period), and has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of think coming out of the high workshops of Scandinavia, or the Knoll, Herman Miller, Dunbar, and other great purveyors of the time.
"Period" when used in the mid-century, usually means "of that period." A lot of the Plycraft Eames 670 chair knockoffs are referred to as being "period."
Language is an ever-shifting construct. People tend to use it as they understand it, and often times their understanding isn't shared by the world at large. So when you're Googling or Craigslisting for this stuff, do several searches - under all of the terms above, as well as the manufacturer or the designer, if you know specifically what you're looking for.
Oh, yeah, one more: "Eames Era" will get you an awful lot of results, too.
