why buy the cow?

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 08/01/2002 5:41:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM writes:

> The kind of work that Barry Popik does, and Fred Shapiro, and Jim
>  Landau, among others -- work that involves extensive library visits,
>  specialized knowledge of research sources, travel in foreign
>  countries, or even just reading extensively and carefully from
>  selected texts for antedatings -- would be very hard to compensate
>  fairly in any case, because it's so incredibly labor-intensive for the
>  amount of data generated.  I have no idea how many words the
>  abovesaid gentlemen can research in a day, but I suspect it's a lot
>  fewer than the 150 [sic] or so entries reviewed by each person on my
>  staff every day

It's not the heat, it's the humdiity.  That is, FINDING the antedatings is
easy.  It's the interminable cross-checking that eats up the time.  If
Merriam-Webster ever paid me for my etymologies, the first thing I would do
with the money would be to hire a file clerk.

What makes it wierder is that Barry Popik would have a totally different
answer.  It is not unusual for me to find up to half a dozen citations of the
same word or phrase, and then have to do extensive pick and shovel work to
unscramble them.  Barry, on the other hand, typically sings Halleluyah if he
can find TWO citations for the same term.

Have you managed to suppress the memory of the time I sent you half a page of
calculus to demonstrate that a particular term ("geometric progression")
matched the M-W definition?

          - Jim Landau
            systems engineer who thinks everybody should learn calculus

P.S.  When the mail room calls you tomorrow, hide under your desk.