publisher for the False Etymology Book

[Dave Wilton]

> I'm glad to see that Frank likes the idea, and that he thinks
> that it would be commercially viable. I have my own biases,
> of course, but it seems to me that if the book were published
> as a scholarly mongraph (i.e, as a PUBLICATION OF THE AMERICAN
> DIALECT SOCIETY number) it would carry more weight with the
> world of journalists than something that seemed designed
> primarily to make money. And as a PADS volume it would also
> be instantly distributed to all the major libraries in the
> world, as well as to the most important of the journalistic
> opinion-makers (Safire, whatever you may think about him,
> generally is meticulous about researching traditional scholarly
> materials, if not letters to the editor and list-serve opinions).

Journalists won't be influenced by the a PADS volume because they won't read
a PADS volume. All the journalists had to do was look up "Windy City" in the
OED and they would have known that the Dana story was false. But they didn't
do that. And some 50 years ago Mathew's Dictionary of Americanisms published
a citation that antedated the Dana story. The evidence has been there; the
journalists just haven't looked in the right places.

Most journalists do a very different kind of research than academics do.
They don't do literature searches or cruise the stacks in libraries looking
for source material. They check a few files, make a few phone calls, or at
most run a Lexis-Nexis or web search. If two or three sources back up the
story, they run with it. (While is this usually fine for the news, it
creates a problem with folklore, because most sources will repeat the
folklore. Read any of the literature on urban legends and you will find that
journalists are among the most notorious vectors of myths--right ahead of
tour guides.) If you want to get journalists to take notice, you have to go
with a popular press book that they are likely see a review of--or, if
you're lucky, actually read the book itself.

I'm not saying a PADS volume isn't a good idea (it is a very good idea),
just that if the purpose is to influence journalists it is not the way to go
about it. A PADS volume should be directed toward the academic
community--they're the only ones that will read it. (Influencing the masses
is a lost cause.)

Now if you really wanted to influence journalists, you would get Bill Safire
to write a column taking his fellow journalists (and the Chicago Historical
Society) to task for not checking the OED when they are writing stories
about words.