Major Antedating of "Smog"

[Fred Shapiro]

While hunting quotations for the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, I have
come upon a major antedating of the word "smog" in the writings of our
greatest lexicographer.

The OED's first two citations for "smog," both dated July 1905, strongly
indicate that the word was coined at a scientific congress that month.  A
recent scholarly edition of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, however,
alludes to Bierce having used the word in 1884.  I checked Bierce's
original article, and indeed it produces the following citation:

1884 Ambrose Bierce in _The Wasp_ (San Francisco) 6 Dec. 3/1  The Devil's
Dictionary...FOG, _n_.  A substance remaining after the last analysis of
San Franciscan atmosphere--the sewer-gas, dust, cemetery effluvium,
disease germs and other ingredients having been eliminated.  Of these,
however, dust is the chief, and as Mr. Edmund Yates, by combining the
words "smoke" and "fog," gave to the London atmosphere the graphic name of
"smog," we, in humble imitation but with inferior felicity, may confer
upon our own grumous environment the title of "dog."

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Public Services     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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