Antedatings from children

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 04:39:46PM -0400, James A. Landau wrote:
>
> Anyone who has done etymological research must have similar stories, but I'd
> like to tell mine here.  Joanne Despres talks about how "incredibly
> labor-intensive" it is to find antedatings.  On the contrary, I recently had
> an antedating that went in search of me.

[deletia]

> Two months later I still had not found the book and was considering ordering
> another copy.  Then my daughter, age 15, suddenly realized that there was no
> reason she had to keep her bed in the corner where Mommy and I had placed her
> crib for convenience back when she was an infant.  So she asked me to help
> her rearrange the furniture.  As we moved her bed the copy of _A Beautiful
> Mind_ emerged.  She had borrowed it without telling me.

Well, I'll give you age 15, and raise you 2:

I was reading to my older daughter Maisie, who is 2, at the
breakfast table. She's an insatiable reader; we go through two
dozen books a day (usually the same one or two, a dozen times
over, but I digress). We had finished the ones that were in
front of her, and I asked her what she wanted me to read next.
"That one!," she said, pointing. "_This_ one?" I asked. "Yes,
that one, that one!" So I duly pulled off the shelf the copy of
Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ that she had not only clearly
pointed to, but confirmed. "Maisie, I don't think you'll like
this," I warned.

I opened it randomly and read about three sentences before she
go bored and demanded we go back to Blue's Clues. But in those
three sentences, I found an example of _privilege_ as a verb,
in the modern lit-crit sense, from 1955 (the translation),
about 25 years earlier than our then-earliest example.

I desperately hope Barry or Fred doesn't further antedate this,
because I want to be dining off this story for the rest of my
career in lexicography.

> It was a trivial matter to locate the quote (it being a quoted letter, I only
> had to look for a full page of doubly-indented text) and I sent it off to
> Jeff.  Lo and behold I got an e-mail from Mark Dunn of the OED saying that
> this usage was being added to the on-line OED in the next update, that my
> citation antedated anything in the OED files, and unfortunately it had
> arrived just too late for the update.

And I can confirm that it's there now. (Mark Dunn's our math specialist.)

Jesse Sheidlower
OED