[Ads-l] Dating "Grauniad" for the typo-prone "Guardian"

ADSGarson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Mon Feb 20 18:30:41 UTC 2017


I did not find a match for "Grauniad" in the OED.

The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
(2015) points to "Private Eye" as originator:

[Begin excerpt]
Grauniad noun the Grauniad the Guardian newspaper UK An anagram,
coined in the mid- to late 1970s by satirical magazine Private Eye.
Despite the improvement in spell-check technology the nickname remains
widely popular.
[End excerpt]

Year: circa 1967
Periodical: West Africa
Issues 2613-2639
Quote Page 981
Publisher: West Africa Publishing Company Limited (GB metadata)
Google Books Snippet; data may be inaccurate; 1967 issues are present
in the volume; 1969 is in the future for some issues
https://books.google.com/books?id=nysuAQAAIAAJ

[Begin extracted text]
Gaffes
We have had more than our share of mistakes on our pages recently
(surplus gremlins from The Grauniad?). Most are plain embarrassing,
causing one to weep inwardly, and put in another abject correction.
Recently, however two have ...
[End extracted text]

Year: circa 1968
Periodical: Private Eye
Issues 158-160; Issues 162-170
Google Books Snippet; data may be inaccurate; search for 1967, 1968,
1969 suggest that year is accurate
https://books.google.com/books?id=mJVnAAAAMAAJ

[Begin page 8 except visible in snippet]
Newspaper strike, D. Mail, Sun, Sketch and Grauniad go out of business.
[End excerpt]

[Begin OCR excerpt – text not visible in snippet]
["wo distinguished Kremlinologlsts, Victor Sorza of the Grauniad and
David Floyd of the Telegraph had had the story for several reeks
without using it. Zorza had shown lome interest and had asked
Odnopozov to rrite down his story in the third ...
[End excerpt]

Garson


On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Joel Berson <berson at att.net> wrote:
> Can anyone trace "Grauniad" as an anagram name for the once typo-prone "Guardian" into the 1960s or earlier?
>
> Joel
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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



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