Sad news about David Shulman

[Fred Shapiro]

David Shulman was a major contributor to the OED and published a number of
good pieces in American Speech.  Adriana Orr, the Washington researcher
for the OED, once told me that David's slips never needed correcting.  I
also believe David was a major figure in the bibliography of cryptography.

I first met David when I was sitting in the New York Public Library with a
dozen or so volumes of the OED strewn about me (remember when the OED was
used in print form?).  He came over and asked me what I was doing.  I then
became friendly with him, although after I moved to New Haven I failed to
keep up communications.

My favorite memory of David involved a ridiculously flawed article about
"The Words of Scrabble" published in American Speech in the mid-1980s.
The author analyzed the words in the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary
and concluded that this lexicon was way ahead of the new-word watchers in
Springfield and Oxford in picking up novel vocabulary.  I discovered that,
in addition to the author's failing to realize that this book was compiled
by Merriam-Webster, the author had done a terrible job of checking earlier
dictionaries and missed the fact that a lot of the supposedly novel words
had previously appeared in Webster's Collegiate.  David, employing his
characteristic methodicalness and driven by his own strong interest in the
game of Scrabble, found that in fact all of the words had appeared in
earlier dictionaries and the article author had concocted a theory with
absolutely no basis in reality.  Both my response and David's were
published in American Speech; I wanted to call mine "Scrabble Babble" but
Ron Butters wouldn't let me.  David adopted a more restrained and
gentlemanly tone in his piece.

Fred Shapiro


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------