African American, was: "AAVE" (the abbrev. itself)

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 09:27:30AM -0500, Mullins, Bill wrote:
> >Interestingly, I was just having a discussion with a colleague
> >about this problem--the fact that historical citation research,
> >and in particular the data available in big databases, can
> >obscure rather than illumine the real history of terms, because
> >it can give a false impression of when a usage truly became
> >current.
>
> I respectfully disagree with your conclusion here.  More (relevant) data is
> always useful.  If it "obscures" the history,  it's because the data aren't
> being analyzed properly.  The fault lies with the person drawing the
> conclusion, rather than the presence or absence of the data, or the
> existence of the database.
>
> The existence of searchable huge databases is, essentially, a new tool.
> It's not suprising that new procedures, questions, analyses, etc. that take
> advantage of that tool must be developed as well.  IMHO.

Oh, believe me, I'm not questioning the value of these tools. In fact,
I am right now at a conference devoted to digital library tools, where
I am presenting a paper about the value of electronic databases for
historical lexicography.

I said that such data _can_ obscure the history of terms, not that
it's always bad to have real data instead of guesswork.

I think this very thread is a good example of what I'm talking
about.  We were having a pretty close look at a narrow
issue--when the term _African-American_ became common enough
in the scholarly community to be used as part of the name for
a variety of English--and it very quickly got sidetracked into
displays of nineteenth-century examples of the term, which
have no relevance to the issue at hand. And this is among
people attuned to such concerns.

Dictionary people, especially on the publicity side, are guilty
of this sort of thing too, because it gets attention, and because
it really is interesting. But one must be very careful to analyze
things properly. I know that Fred would agree that even if he
found an example of _personal computer_ from 1951, it wouldn't
say very much about when Americans in general started to use
computers in their homes, or anything like that.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED