Tango

[Laurence Horn]

Fred Shapiro writes:
>On Tue, 28 Mar 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>
>>     The Cornell Making of America database is very helpful for "wag the
>>dog,"
>> "Great Scott," and even "pizza."
>
>I have been using the Cornell Making of America database for tracing
>word-origins for a couple of months now.  It appears to be richer for this
>purpose than the University of Michigan MOA, and indeed it appears to be
>the richest electronic resource for historical linguistic research
>currently in existence.
>
>Here are some of the more important terms I have antedated using Cornell
>MOA:
>
>linguistics
>imperialism
>aesthetics
>feminist
>...

Yes, indeed.  There's a wonderful article by Goldwin Smith from the 1898 North
American Review--"Is the Constitution Outworn?"--that holds Europe as
responsible for exporting "sexual revolution and political feminism" to the
U.S.  And I found a reference to "semantics" in an 1874 review of an
edition of Sophocles, two decades before linguistic scholars devised the
term as a translation of Bréal's "la sémantique", the latter also appearing
in the Cornell MoA in the form of an ad for the Henry Holt edition of the
volume of the same name in the December 1900 Atlantic Monthly.  (The OED's
first cite of "semantics" is from an 1893 translation of a passage from
Bréal.)

larry