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<font size=3>Paul Dickson still thinks Benjamin Franklin collected the
228 terms for intoxication of the <i>Pennsylvania Gazette</i>'s 1737
"Drinker's Dictionary". In his 2009 <i>Drunk: The
Definitive Drinker's Dictionary</i>, he writes (p. 8), "The first
person to ever collect and publish a sampling from the cornucopia of
English slang for drunkenness was Benjamin Franklin, who included 228
terms for intoxication in his <i>Drinker's Dictionary</i> in 1737. ...
Franklin published his list ...".<br><br>
My 2006 article -- "The Source for Benjamin Franklin's 'The Drinkers
Dictionary' (and Was It Mather Byles?)", <i>American Speech</i>,
vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 164--179 -- showed that a nearly identical but longer
list, of 237 terms, was published by an unidentified writer in the <i>New
England Weekly Journal</i> on July 6, 1736, six months before Franklin's
<i>PG</i> piece. Franklin merely reprinted the <i>NEWJ </i>list,
with minor alterations and a few cuts, although he wrote his own essay to
accompany it.<br><br>
As Robert Hume wrote in 1999, “Once a factual error is in print [he could
have added “or on the World Wide Web”], it is virtually ineradicable, for
it will be picked up and repeated."<br><br>
Joel</font></body>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org