Database searches on "picayune"?

[James E. Clapp]

Rudolph C Troike wrote:
>
>         I was hoping some of our regulars such as Barry and Fred could
> check their database files to see if there was a regional pattern in
> publication cites, or if anything else interesting turned up on age (have
> citations declined in recent years, and how far back to do they go).

I looked in two Lexis databases (law reviews and state court decisions) and
am happy to report that this nice word appears to be alive and well and used
throughout the United States.

The database of state court opinions is pretty comprehensive.  I excluded
all cases from Louisiana (home of the Picayune newspaper) and Mississippi
(home of the town of Picayune).  In the remaining states, I tallied
citations by time period for two basic meanings:

(N) picayune, n., a coin of small worth; figuratively, a small sum of money
("I wouldn't give a picayune for it."  "Not worth a picayune."  "Doesn't
amount to a picayune." etc.)

(A) picayune, adj., petty, paltry (almost always of a thing, sometimes of a
sum of money, very rarely of a person).

Results by time period (number of cases using the word in each sense):

19th century:  (N) 2 cases from Alabama (1841 and 1863)
               (A) 2 cases (Maryland 1852, New York 1897)

1900-1924: (N) 2
           (A) 1

1925-1949: (N) 4
           (A) 5

1950-1974: (N) 1
           (A) 40

1975-1999: (N) 1
           (A) 68

Jan-Feb 2000: (N) 0
              (A) 1 (quoting a treatise referring to "one of the most
                     picayune areas of appellate law")

Caveats:  I don't absolutely swear to these counts, but they are pretty
accurate.  Research in this kind of database has inherent distortions,
however:  The number of opinions published in each time period is much
greater than in previous time periods; later cases quote earlier cases; a
word used in a treatise gets quoted repeatedly; a judge who takes a liking
to a word may use it repeatedly.  But state court judges are often pretty
close to the people, and  some instances of a word in a case report are
quotations from testimony of actual real people.


The law review database covers a whole lot of law reviews going back various
lengths of time, but fifteen years back is about the outer limit.  I
searched for "picayune" not adjacent to "times" and got 126 articles.  I
looked at a sampling of maybe 10%, and except for one reference to Picayune
cigarettes (a brand name), they all used the word in the sense of petty or
paltry.  A review of all 126 cites would weed out a few more, and no doubt
some of the uses are in quotations and thus not directly attributable to the
author of the article, but from what I saw it is clear that lots and lots of
legal writers in recent years have this word in their active vocabulary and
use it in their writing.

As to geographic distribution, recall that I excluded Louisiana and
Mississippi from the search; the cases I found in which the word was used or
quoted covered the country pretty well, from Connecticut, New York, New
Jersey, and Maryland to Alaska, Washington, California, and Hawaii.  And
remember, state judges usually have pretty deep roots in the states where
they sit.

So why do we keep hearing about students and colleagues who don't know the
word?  Frankly, a lot of people, and especially a lot of young people, have
pathetic vocabularies.*  I'm sure they know many current slang terms that
old fogies like me don't know, but most of those terms will fade from use
and their core vocabulary will still be pathetic unless it can be expanded
somehow in college.  We can't assume that a word has dropped out of the
language just because a classroom-full of youngsters claims unfamiliarity
with it; after all, if we're still using a word then it is still a current
English word!  We just have to tell them what it means and say "It's a good
word.  You should know it."

James E. Clapp

* A recent example from my own life:  I was corresponding with the marketing
director of a computer hardware company and mentioned a particular cavil
about their equipment that I hoped he would pass along to the engineers.  He
wrote back: "Thank you for teaching me a new word today--'cavil'--that's got
to come in mighty handy in Scrabble!"  I'm not saying that this one word is
a particular test of anything, but it was a bit of a jolt--and kind of
depressing--that a word I use without the slightest thought stuck him as
quite exotic (though his enthusiasm about adding to his vocabulary is
commendable).  I mean, it's not like I'm Bill Buckley or something.