"Windy City" wrong in NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW(3-9-03)

[Fred Shapiro]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Michael Quinion wrote:

> I'm a little pessimistic about the effect it will have on rebutting
> the mountains of misinformation out there on word origins. Geoff
> Pullum's book hasn't greatly reduced the number of references to all
> those Eskimo words for snow. But I share your hope that its existence
> will at least provide a place to which doubters can be referred.

I have published articles about the origin of the computer term "bug" in
American Speech, Byte, and the Annals of the History of Computing, plus a
letter to the editor in the New York Times Book Review.  Also, the New
York Times ran a big article about my findings after "Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire" decided the million-dollar question based on the wrong story
of the origin of the computer "bug."  The Hacker's Dictionary and online
Jargon File picked up on my conclusions, which as a result are all over
the Internet.

As a result of my efforts, some inroads have been made against the phony
etymology in the popular mind, but every day the wrong story gets repeated
in the media and in books about computing.  But -- how shall I say this?
-- I recognize that the prevalence of etymological information is a fact
of life and I don't post a continual stream of messages bewailing every
repetition of untruth in the media.  We live in a world of inaccuracy,
with journalists being at the forefront.  Barry carps at William Safire,
but Safire's language column is a bastion of solid information compared
with the rest of the journalistic and political universe.  It will take
years before all the disinformation coming out of the Bush administration
is sorted out by historians -- that's a more important target for
truth-seekers than bogus accounts of "Windy City."

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access 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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