David Shulman obit in NY Times

[Benjamin Zimmer]

http://nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/07shulman.html

The New York Times
November 7, 2004
A Man of Many Words, David Shulman Dies at 91
BY DOUGLAS MARTIN

David Shulman, a self-described Sherlock Holmes of Americanisms who dug
through obscure, often crumbling publications to hunt down the first use
of thousands of words, died on Oct. 30 at Victory Memorial Hospital in
Brooklyn. He was 91 and lived in Brooklyn.

His friend David Kahn announced the death.

Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, said
Mr. Shulman contributed uncountable early usages to the 20-volume lexicon.
"All very good stuff," Mr. Sheidlower said.

"What David did was read through the sort of things most people don't
read," he added, mentioning yellowing editions of The National Police
Gazette.

Mr. Sheidlower said only a few contributors were more prolific and fewer
still possessed Mr. Shulman's knack for sending usable material. His name
appeared in the front matter to O.E.D.'s epochal second edition, each of
the Addition Series volumes, and is currently on the Web.

Mr. Shulman avoided excessive modesty, letting it drop that he was at
least temporarily the last word on words that included "The Great White
Way," "Big Apple," "doozy," "hoochie-coochie." Gerald Cohen, professor of
foreign languages at the University of Missouri, Rolla, said Mr. Shulman
did indeed contribute to the understanding of all these words and many
more.

He said Mr. Shulman's most pioneering effort concerned the term "hot dog."
He found the word was college slang before it was a sausage, paving the
way for deeper investigation. A book on hot dog's glossarial provenance
will appear this year under the names of Mr. Shulman, Mr. Cohen and Barry
Popick.

Dr. Cohen said Mr. Shulman obliterated a big impediment to finding the
origins of the word jazz by proving it was on a 1919 record, not the 1909
version of the same disk. (Other scholars traced first use of the term to
the baseball columns of Scoop Gleeson in the San Francisco Bulletin in
1913.)

Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Shulman was first to challenge that "shyster"
derived from a lawyer named Scheuster. Others, particularly Roger
Mohovich, then traced the etymology to 1843-1844. "Shyster" turned out to
be a Yiddish corruption of a German vulgarism meaning a crooked lawyer.

Mr. Shulman considered the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue his
real home. He commuted by subway to its rare books room, to which he
donated valuable volumes.

"David Shulman was the one reader I could count on seeing at the library
every day," Paul LeClerc, president of the library, said. "We often spoke
about his work, and I never knew anyone who thrilled to bookish
discoveries as he did."

Every inch of Mr. Shulman, from his sneakers to his plastic bag crammed
with scrawled notes to his soiled baseball cap, suggested the classic New
York eccentric. He recorded his finds on index cards, sending them to the
O.E.D. when he got 100.

His obsessions included trying to prove that Steve Brodie jumped off the
Brooklyn Bridge on July 23, 1886, not faking it as many reports claimed.
He once wrote a sonnet, "Washington Crossing the Delaware" in which each
line is an anagram of the title.

But in 70 years at the library, he allowed as how he had seen, well, odder
folks. There was the well-dressed chap who wandered about for years
carrying his hat and never touching a book. Or the man who tracked down
burial places of 60,000 New Jersey soldiers. Mr. Shulman finally asked
why.

"I might as well be plain with you," the man replied, according to an
interview with Mr. Shulman in The New York Times in 1990. "I'm a nut."

David Shulman was born on Nov. 12, 1912, and grew up on the Lower East
Side speaking Yiddish, according to an interview in The Jerusalem Report
in 1999. His first library was a branch in the Bronx.

After City College, he devised puzzles and puzzle contests for newspapers.
During World War II, he cracked Japanese secret codes for the Army, then
returned to puzzles.

He was a founder of the American Cryptogram Association, and in 1976
published "An Annotated Bibliography of Cryptography," still used by
experts. He was a champion scrabble player, and wrote a scholarly article
about the game's lexicography.

After a heart attack in his early 80's, Mr. Shulman gave beloved
possessions to the New York Public Library. Gifts included a primer from
Colonial America, 20,000 century-old postcards and Bowery Boys novels the
library did not have. He earlier donated his cryptography collection,
including a book about secret writing from 1518.

His mentor at the library was Norbert Pearlroth, famed researcher for
"Ripley's Believe It or Not!" Mr. Shulman came to view him as less than
rigorous.

"Instead of believing it," he said in an interview with The Times in 1999.
"I believed it not."

Mr. Shulman never married, and made it clear he had scant time for his
only relatives, two nieces who tried to stop him from giving his treasures
to the library.

"I hate to say it, but your relatives can be predators," he said to The
Times in 1999.

Mr. Shulman always insisted that the persnickety pickiness he exemplified
rates among the supreme virtues.

"What difference does it make?" he sputtered in an interview with The
Times in 1989. "Why, the same difference as being literate or illiterate,
accurate or inaccurate, telling the truth or spreading yarns."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company