FW: Antedating of "Banana Republic" -- EOTY

[Michael Quinion]

> What follows, courtesy of Michael Q and Fred S, is truly amazing,
> in terms of the ability to find such info so quickly, and to
> disseminate it to the world.
>
> Hats off to both MQ and FS!
>
> I hereby cast my vote for this exchange as the Etymology of the Year.

You're very kind. It looks easy, as so often, because it rests on
large amounts of work by other people. The real credit should, at
least in my case, go to the Project Gutenberg team, who have
digitised so many texts, and also to dtSearch, which produced the
excellent program I use to index and search this and a lot of other
etexts.

--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>