sidebar to recent discussion of southmore

[Fred Shapiro]

On Wed, 24 May 2000, Bernard W. Kane wrote:

> Have Listmembers encountered the fairly recent usage of "sophomore" to mean:
> the second of a sequence
> (analogous to "freshman" meaning the first, the initial one -- as in "your
> freshman --followed by your sophomore-- year in college)?

This is hardly recent.  I assume Bernard is not talking about "sophomore"
in a transferred usage meaning the second year of something other than
college, such as "sophomore jinx" in baseball -- that usage is quite old.
Even for the adjectival use referring to the second of a sequence, I can
find evidence at least as far back as 1982:

1982 _Wash. Post_ 4 Apr.  Or maybe it's simply the departure of producer
Alan Winstanley ... that has made the Doctors' sophomore album ... so much
more rigid than their first.


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