Half-orphan

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU
Tue Jun 7 18:50:43 UTC 2005


On Tue, 7 Jun 2005 14:34:32 -0400, Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:

>It is indeed a curious oversight, considering that the databases have
>numerous attestations back to the mid-19th century. Here's the earliest
>from APS:
>
>-----
>_The Friend_, Feb. 3, 1838, p. 143, col. 3
>First Annual Report of the [New York] Association for the Benefit of
>Coloured Orphans.
>...
>The number of orphans has been gradually increased, and the managers now
>have it in their power to congratulate their benefactors on having
>extended their fostering care to twenty-nine destitute children. Several
>of this number are half-orphans, who have been admitted on the same terms
>required in the Half-Orphan Asylum.
>-----

And the participial adjective "half-orphaned" goes back even earlier:

-----
http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/Works/SmitCBeach.htm
Charlotte [Turner] Smith, "The Truant Dove, From Pilpay"
in _Beachy Head: With Other Poems_ (London, 1807)

Then to her cold and widow'd bed she crept,
Clasp'd her half-orphan'd young, and wept!
-----


--Ben Zimmer



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