merry chrismukkah/happy holidays

[Grant Barrett]

To follow-up: With two citations, it's been shown that the
writers/creators/producers/characters on "The OC" did not coin "Merry
Chrismukkah." We know this because the "The Best Chrismukkah Ever"
episode first aired December 3, 2003; even given lead times on episode
production, I doubt the scripts were done too long before that. The
earliest cite we've found with only cursory searching is 1996. There
are also many other cites under various spellings between 1996 and
2003. So, either thousands of people--including writers for "The
OC"--coined the word independently, or else it was already in
circulation.

[Of course, this is all true only if you take coin to mean "to invent;
to neologize." The reason I add that caveat is that I keep seeing a
non-literal use of "to coin (a word)" when what is really meant is "to
say something cleverly" or even "to call a thing something other than
its name." It's similar to when people say "to coin a phrase" after
something which has, of course, been said before that moment.]

On Nov 19, 2004, at 14:29, Gabriel Sanders wrote:

> I'm working on a story about the phrase "Merry Chrismukkah," which
> seems to have been coined by the writers of the FOX teen drama "The
> OC." In this light, I've been thinking about holiday greetings
> generally and "Happy Holidays" in particular. Does anyone happen to
> know its earliest use? And has anyone ever been wished a "Merry
> Chrismukkah"?

Grant Barrett

-- Project Editor, "Historical Dictionary of American Slang," Oxford
University Press
-- Editor, Double-Tongued Word Wrester, http://www.doubletongued.org/
-- Webmaster, American Dialect Society, http://www.americandialect.org/