Barry's message: .. My book is published

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

   I'm confused. What book is Barry talking about? How can it be his published book when it's clearly written by someone else?

  Btw, in the "hot dog" book by Cohen/Popik/Shulman I clarify that 3/4 of the book's material comes from Barry. There must be no doubt about the enormous contributions Barry has been making to the study of Americanisms,
and one of the tasks of ads-l is to see that his contributions (and those of other scholars too) receive due credit.

Gerald Cohen

> ----------
> From:         American Dialect Society on behalf of Bapopik at AOL.COM
> Sent:         Sunday, October 17, 2004 6:47 AM
> To:   ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject:           "Hip" from Wolof?; Big Apple Whores (cont.); My book is published
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------
> MY BOOK IS PUBLISHED
>
> My book arrived; the book party is Tuesday. I've been depressed all week.
>
> Last Saturday, I took a walking tour of Little India in Jackson Heights. I
> thought I'd do some work on "Bollywood," and all the NYPL materials were, as
> usual, off site. Wednesday, after work, I headed to the Science, Industry, and
> Business library (open until 8 p.m.) and ordered the books. Thursday and Friday
> should have been plenty of time to get them, and I'd read them on Saturday.
>
> Yesterday, I made the trek to the NYPL. My books weren't there. "You made the
> request when?" I was asked. There was no trace of my off-site request. I
> would have to request the books again. That's how it's been.
>
> Barry Popik! I'm Barry Popik! This happens to me every single goddamn time!
> Is there some problem? Every single thing I do my entire life is like this!
> Soylent Green is made of people! People!!!!!!!!!
>
> Which brings me again to my new book. I can't say what the book is because
> ADS-L archives are Google-searchable.
>
> Let's start off with "hot dog." It's written by the expected person. Written
> poorly. My name is never cited, but Gerald Cohen's is. Also cited is David K.
> Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf's AMERICA IN SO MANY WORDS, because you'd want to receive my "hot dog" work second-hand.
>
> Let's check "corn dog." (Corn is on the cover of the book.)  "And it is no
> coincidence that the corn dog (invented as the 'cozydog' in Springfield,
> Illinois, in 1947) and cornflakes (by Kellogg's in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1902)
> both originated in the Midwest,..." I'd posted here in February 2003 that "corn
> flakes" was cited from the 1890s. In November 2002, I'd posted "corn dog"
> from 1939. In April 2003, I'd posted "corn dog" from 1929. In November 2003, I'd
> posted "corn dog" hitting  Los Angeles in 1940.
>
> Let's check "gyro." I had made a special trip to Chicago for this. Nope, not t
> here.
>
> Let's check "Danish pastry." I'd traced this to a Danish baker in New York
> City, but no one will ever know.
>
> Let's check "slang." The entry is by Tom Dalzell and several AMERICAN SPEECH
> articles are cited. No dates are attached to most of the slang. "86"--perhaps
> the greatest slang term of this type--is not mentioned. My work on Michael
> Casey and the Bowery origin of food slang ("Adam and Eve on a Raft") is not
> mentioned. Despite this, Dalzell's "slang" article is still one of the best written
> in the book.
>
> Let's check "smoothie." I did tremendous work on this, but there's no entry.
> Just one line! "Smoothies, thick drinks consisting of fresh fruit blended with
> milk, yogurt, or ice cream, became popular in the 1980s." ONE LINE! Not even
> a good one line.
>
> Let's check "Sicilian pizza," of which I'd recently posted and should make
> another post with an earlier cite. It's not here under "pizza."
>
> Let's check "ice cream." This entry had better be good--"ice cream" is
> important. Let's start with "sundae":
>
> "The invention of the ice cream sundae is also the stuff of legend. One
> version has it that preachers thought it was sinful to si[p sodas on Sundays, which
> led an enterprising soda jerk to invent the sundae. Another says it was
> invented when someone ran out of soda water. The sundae was hugely popular, and
> other ice cream innovations followed."
>
> That's it. No names. No places. No dates.
>
> Let's check "iced tea." It's in a section about the 1904 St. Louis World's
> Fair: "Visitors are more conventional food than at other fairs but were first
> introduced to iced tea, Eskay's healthy baby foods, sliced bread, and,
> purportedly, hot dogs and hamburgers." But in the section on "tea," there's this: "Iced
> tea was also available in the 1870s in hotels and railroads."  My important
> find in the 1857 SATURDAY EVENING POST is never mentioned.
>
> Let's check "Long Island Iced Tea." It isn't here!
>
> The cocktail sections were written by Dale DeGroff, who quotes the same usual
> sources and does no original research.
>
> Let's check "coffee." Surely, my book would have some of my work on
> "cappuccino" in America, tracing the historical sites in San Francisco and New York
> (Caffe Regio on MacDougall Street). "Cappuccino" is not even in the index!
>
> So it goes, on term after term of American food and drink.
>
> On Friday, I brought the book to work. Everybody was impressed. Yeah, the
> binding is fabulous.
>
> And I'm thinking, why am I still doing parking tickets for a living? Why is
> this even a book and not an electronically searchable format? Why am I not
> writing a dictionary and blasting all of this apart?
>
> Why do I live another day? To get plagiarized by Chicago? To tell people
> twice a week that the Big Apple doesn't come from whores? Is that it?
>
>