"Nitpicky" (was RE: "Virtuous circle")

[Fred Shapiro]

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Paul McFedries wrote:

> citations. However, the earliest occurs in a Washington Post story from
> April 21, 1980, so it must be fairly new. That explains why "older"

As David Barnhart has noted, the fact that the first usage on Nexis is
dated 1980 doesn't mean that much.  The earliest I find on JSTOR is the
following:

1964 _Amer. Econ. Rev._ 54: 597  Economics would not be so difficult if
economists would just stop being obscurantist, pedantic, and nit-picky.

Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2