Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 20:57:19 -0400
From: Fred Shapiro
Subject: Re: Pansy; Irate; Internment; Hotel; Banjo; Teens; Ben Dova, et al.

Barry's posting is fascinating, as always, and I wish I had time to
respond to it more fully. Let me make just 3 comments:

1. The 121-year "antedating" of _irate_ is surely a misspelling. Could
it really be _pirate master_?

2. Barry's 1941 example of _square_ is valuable, but note that Tom
Dalzell says in _Flappers 2 Rappers_ that the term was used by Cab
Calloway in 1938.

3. I applaud Barry's use of Web and CD-ROM tools to trace word-origins.
I discuss such research extensively in an article I have submitted to
_American Speech_, entitled "A Study in Computer-Assisted Lexicology:
Evidence on the Emergence of _Hopefully_ as a Sentence Adverb from JSTOR
and Other Electronic Resources." In this article I trace
sentence-adverbial _hopefully_ back to 1851 using electronic resources
(well, actually, I trace it back to 1911 in the article as written, but
since I submitted it I have found an 1851 example).

I am a little puzzled by Barry's use of JSTOR to find a 1951 example of
_status symbol_ in the _British Journal of Sociology_, since the _British
Journal of Sociology_ is not covered by JSTOR (perhaps he found an article
in another journal citing the _British Journal of Sociology_) and since
the earliest usage in JSTOR of _status symbol_ is a 1946 article in the
_American Sociological Review_.


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Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2
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