Scofflaw

[James E. Clapp]

Ken Burns's recent PBS documentary on Prohibition provides a convenient
occasion to announce a book that has just rolled off the press--a
four-way collaboration organized by Fred Shapiro called "Lawtalk: The
Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions."  (Info at
www.amazon.com/dp/030017246X, though the "Search Inside" feature isn't
working yet, and the blurbs--for which we thank Ben Zimmer among
others--have not yet been posted.)

Burns's documentary touches upon a story that has come up here from time
to time, and in so doing provides an inadvertent lesson on the
importance of careful reading of original sources.  In what appears to
be a loose rewrite of the OED's first citation for "scofflaw," the
narrator tells us:

          In 1924, four years after Prohibition was first
          imposed, the Boston Herald would offer two hundred
          dollars to the reader who came up with a brand new
          word for someone who flagrantly ignored the edict
          and drank liquor that had been illegally made or
          illegally sold.  Twenty-five thousand responded.
          Two readers split the prize.  Each had come up
          with the same word: scofflaw.

While the basic outline of the story is correct, most of the details are
wrong: The contest was actually launched in 1923; the offer was not made
by the Boston Herald; it wasn't particularly for readers of that paper;
the number of entrants was closer to 5,000 than 25,000 (though most
submitted several suggestions), and there is no reason to assume that
the winners were readers of the Herald.

What is far more interesting, though, is the back story about the
contest--the colorful character who sponsored it, the counter-contests
sponsored by anti-Prohibitionists, the kinds of words entered on both
sides, the suspicious facts about the identities of the co-winners--and
what one might call the *forth* story: how the new word was initially
ridiculed, why it gained acceptance, and how it repeatedly died out and
then was resurrected in the years after Prohibition.

It's one of the scores of stories we tell and document in Lawtalk.  I
wish I'd known about Allan Metcalf's insightful discussion of the word
in his 2002 book "Predicting New Words" when I was writing our entry; I
certainly would have cited it!  But more material has become available
since then, and even people familiar with Allan's work--and with Barry
Popik's groundbreaking research on the word published on this list in
1997--will find new and amusing information in our account.


James E. Clapp
Author of Random House Webster's Dictionary of the Law
and (with Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Marc Galanter, and Fred R. Shapiro) of
Lawtalk: The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org