Borschtich, Blini, Tschi, Piroggi, Vodka (1799)(A GEM!!)

[Fred Shapiro]

In my message earlier this morning I referred to the fact that even a very
careful antedater can miss things or make mistakes.  I should have added
that the original readers for the OED faced a much tougher task, since
they had no OED to check for datings and thus could easily pass over a
term, thinking it was not worth "carding," that later would turn out to be
earlier than the OED's first use.

Most readers for the original OED were not brilliant researchers like
Barry, but rather literary-minded people with time on their hands who
happened to enlist in the effort of looking through texts to make citation
slips for the OED.  As is well known, non-literary and non-British texts
were canvassed less thoroughly.  Since the older vocabulary in the OED has
not been reexamined for a century or so, it is only now that whatever
weaknesses were present in reading of older texts are being addressed.

If you want to see reference works that have TRULY surprising omissions,
study Bartlett's Quotations or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations!

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Public Services     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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