TLC (tender, loving care) (1947)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, 28 May 2005 22:43:42 -0400, bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>http://www.barrypopik.com/article/937/tlc-taxi-limousine-commission-tender-loving-care
>...
>...
>I was writing an article on the "TLC" (Taxi & Limousine Commission) and I
>traced "TLC" ("tender, loving care") to 1947.
>...
>Does anyone have "TLC" as an acronym on any WWII list?

There was some discussion about "TLC" on alt.usage.english last year.  I
noted the 1948 NY Times article attributing the expression to WWII Army
doctors.  Evan Kirshenbaum contributed the following:

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http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.usage.english/msg/c2b95b9f080271cf

Here's a quote that claims that it was coined in 1941 by an identified
person:

    Dr. F. Talbot in 1941 coined the phrase 'TLC' (tender loving care)
    from his observations of a grandmotherly hospital volunteer whose
    loving and cuddling of failure-to-thrive infants miraculously
    turned them around.

          http://www.nanmt.org/premiere.html

Looking at Amazon, this appears to be a quoting (without attribution)
Debra Fulgham Bruce's _Miracle Touch: A Complete Guide to Hands-On
Therapies That Have the Amazing Ability to Heal_.  Other books on
"therapeutic touch" identify him further as Fritz Talbot of Boston and
the hospital as a children's clinic in Dusseldorf, and the volunteer
as a "squat old" woman named Anna.  They don't necessarily credit him
with coining "TLC", though.
-----

>Maybe American Memory has "TLC"? Is Stars & Stripes for WWII digitized?

Is that even in the works?  I thought LoC/American Memory was only
digitizing newspapers through 1923 to avoid copyright issues.  (Not that
_Stars & Stripes_ would be a copyright concern for them...)


--Ben Zimmer