"Bargaining Chip": Antedating & Mystery

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 07:12:33AM -0400, Rick H Kennerly wrote:
>
> In fact, it's painful to ponder the number of useful antecedents passed over
> in university classes, reading rooms, genealogy rooms, and bathrooms just
> because no one knows that a person on this list is looking for it.  Think of
> the power of putting hundreds of thousands of readers to work doing the
> spade work of etymology--a kind of SETI project for the bookish.

You mean like what the OED's been doing for almost 150 years?

You refer to a "debate" similar to one that may have existed between
professional and amateur scientists a hundred years ago; I have no
idea why this is supposed to be a relevant analogy. There's no case
of professional/scholarly/whatever linguists or lexicographers
rejecting people's work out of hand because it comes from amateurs.
As Fred Shapiro pointed out, a great deal of important work is done
by amateurs, including Fred himself, Barry Popik, John Baker, James
Landau, Stuart Silverstein, and others, some of whom may not even
be lawyers, believe it or not.

This is not about the credentials of the person making a suggestion.
It's about what kind of suggestions are worth taking seriously; some
people seem to be saying that every suggestion is worthy of merit,
period, and it is only snobbishness that prevents them from being
looked at by professionals. This is ridiculous. Most of the etymological
suggestions that come from amateurs are preposterously stupid on their
face, unsupported by any evidence or even rational basis for belief,
and don't merit consideration (except for sociolinguistic purposes).
Of course there can some disagreement; I feel that modern evidence
might indeed be useful for "bargaining chip", for example. But if I
were to say that I thought "bulldyke" came from an acronym for
"Broads United for Lesbian Love Doing Young Kids Everyday," which
is only marginally more crazy than some origins that have been
suggested for other terms recently, I would deserve to be told to
shut up and go away. It's a preposterous theory, whether it comes
from an amateur or from a professional, and it's not stifling
discussion or scholarly research to say so.

Jesse Sheidlower