OT: "copyright" (imprint) date vs. publication date

[Victor Steinbok]

I suspect, you're all thinking too hard about this. I can see a reason
for HDAS to be concerned about this kind of dating, as opposed to
standard dictionaries. But, unless it's a result of a "real-time"
ethnographic investigation, the attestation dates necessarily /must/ be
tied to something definite. But true positivism is an exception, not a
rule--getting a definitive nexus for word/phrase origin (e.g., "red
herring" in the modern sense) is more of a lucky coincidence than a
model to be emulated.

And talking about how long it takes a book to go from MS to retail makes
no sense to me. Even today editing+printing time varies significantly
both from book to book and from one domain to another (novels take a
different amount of time than political memoirs or physics textbooks).
So there is no real reason for discussing this in great detail. Can we
just admit that it's true that even the earliest publication dates are,
in some sense, not true and move on?

Diaries are a funny thing. I suppose one can trust some of them (e.g.,
Pepys) for being duplicated verbatim. But most are edited--unless it's
crystal clear what's been added, there could be problems with dating.
The only ones that are actually reliable are original MSS and facsimile
editions.

     VS-)

On 3/28/2011 7:16 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> And don't forget, in the pre-computer days it could *easily* take three
> months for a book actually to appear after the publisher accepted the ms.
> and received the final draft.
>
> OTOH, tiny corrections can be snuck in almost up to the last moment.
>
> The difference between a copyright date of, say, "1900" and "1901" could be
> one or two days or 366. And, as you suggest, the time it takes for anyone to
> read it could be longer than that.
>
> So despite the demands of positivism, HDAS and OED dates all imply a little
> bit of wiggle room.  (Published diaries are an issue unto themselves. You
> may remember the case of "Murphy's Law" many months back.)
>
> But as an HDAS user, you can be confident that the dates therein are the
> most accurate I was able to assign.
>
> Jon

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