David Shulman obit in NY Times (and NY Sun)

[Mullins, Bill]

>From the NY Sun


David Shulman, 92, Prolific 'Big Apple' Lexicographer

BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 4, 2004

David Shulman, who died October 27 at age 92, was a word detective, prolific
contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, cryptographer and
cryptologist, anagrammic poet, and general expert on all things
lexicographical.

Among the longest-resident denizens of the rare book room at the New York
Public Library, Shulman's absence in recent weeks was noted by increasingly
apprehensive staffers. He discovered the library at age 12 and basically
never left - except when it was closed.

His death was first announced on the American Dialect Society Web site,
where etymologists of many stripes eulogized Shulman as a language maven.

Thanks to Shulman, the 3rd edition of the OED has more accurate and, in many
cases, older citations for hundreds of words, among them jazz; doozy (not
from the Dusenberg automobile, as previously had been cited); snowman, and
Big Apple, which he traced to an anti-New York screed published in 1909.

A contributor to etymological journals as well, Shulman theorized that the
word Manhattan was Delaware Indian for "the place where we all get drunk,"
although this was not verified. A 300-page scholarly tome he co-authored
about the history of the term hot dog is in press at the University of
Missouri.

Shulman was also blessed with an enthusiasm for New York history, especially
the kind that can be pursued through musty stacks of newspapers and issues
of the Police Gazette. He told friends that he had recently completed a
manuscript contending that Bowery celebrity saloonkeeper Steve Brodie really
did jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886. Many sources in intervening years
- including the New York Times in Brodie's 1901 obituary - have denied it.

Shulman was born in 1912 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants and grew up
speaking Yiddish at Henry Street on the Lower East Side. Years later in a
letter in the Times, he complimented author Tom Wolfe for using the phrase
"big makher" correctly. (Shulman must have mailed hundreds of letters to the
editor, because at least 50 were published, and he groused about how few got
in.)

Shulman told The Jerusalem Report that he fell in love with lexicography
while hanging around his local library in the Bronx, where the family had
moved.

He graduated from City College in 1937 and found a job writing a column
called "Can You...?" for the World Telegram and other newspapers that
consisted of word puzzles and trivia. (Example: "Can You ... Take two
letters from five to leave four? Yes. Take F and E from FIVE and you leave
IV. Catch a Glasgow magistrate in a fish net? Yes. Glasgow magistrate is a
nickname for a kind of herring."

Shulman served for a time as president of the New York unit of the American
Cryptogram Association. A report on a convention of the group in 1952
disclosed that members addressed one another by proxy names. Shulman's was
Ab Struse. Other members chose anagrams of their real names.

Shulman, meanwhile, showed himself a virtuoso at anagramming in his sonnet
"Washington Crossing the Delaware," in which each of the poem's 14 lines is
an anagram of its title. (A hard, howling, tossing water scene:/Strong tide
was washing hero clean./"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger./O Silent
night shows war ace danger!) The poem was often reprinted as a curiosity.

In recent years he had moved to an assisted-living facility in Bay Ridge,
from which he commuted daily more than an hour each way to the library at
Times Square. He was a familiar sight on the library stairs in his ragged
windbreaker, carrying a large plastic bag filled with papers and dog-eared
index cards in one hand. A librarian who knew Shulman, Robert Scott, said he
had produced drawings to go along with a book of poems Shulman was trying to
get published. "He was more excited about the poems than even he was about
the hot dog book," recalled his co-author of that book, Gerald Cohen of the
University of Missouri-Rolla. Mr. Cohen credited Shulman with "pointing the
way" toward college humor as being the source of the phrase, rather than
Coney Island vendors or a cartoonist who'd been served a frankfurter by
stadium food pioneer Harry Stevens, as some had posited. Another independent
word researcher, Barry Popkin -the third co-author of the book - made the
actual discovery, in a Yale humor magazine, in 1895. The phrase was a
tasteless college jape referring to the common belief - apparently with a
basis in fact - that sausages frequently contained dog meat.

Shulman never married, but had many friends and correspondents, including
H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Heywood Broun, and the magician Ricky Jay. Late
in life he told friends that the only family he had was two nieces, from
whom he was completely estranged after they tried to prevent him from
donating his extensive collections of cryptographic materials and ephemera
to the library.

Among these were an unused ticket to the impeachment trial of Andrew
Johnson, the first printed book on ephemera, from 1518, and 20,000
19th-century postcards.

During World War II, Shulman joined the Army 2nd Signal Corps Battalion,
where he worked decoding Japanese intercepts, then went back to working for
newspapers. He went into "semi-retirement" in the mid-1950s and apparently
rarely earned money after that, except for some small payments for his
citation work for the OED.

The American editor of the OED, Jesse Sheidlower, credited Shulman with
sending in literally tens of thousands of citations, making him one of the
dictionary's most prolific contributors. "He would read unusual sources -
sensationalistic novels and trade magazines - the language in them is very
interesting, closer to the colloquial," said Mr. Sheidlower.

Shulman was particularly proud of his dictionary citations, seeing them as
contributions to the English language. When the OED accepted his early
citation for Big Apple in 1989 - and shortly after the mayor had bestowed an
award on a rival etymologist whose citation was more than a decade later - a
gleeful Shulman told the Times, "Mayor Koch, William Safire,
Merriam-Webster, and other wordmongers, take heed!"

    Correction from November 5, 2004
    October 30 is the date David Shulman died. An obituary on Page 17 of
yesterday's New York Sun misstated the date. Barry Popik co-authored a book
with Shulman. His name was misspelled.