Latest OED Additions

Mon Sep 12 17:49:45 UTC 2005

We've been assuming that "play in Peoria" is originally a theatrical phr., but with Peoria's long history as a dullard center, couldn't it just as easily have started in politics ?

JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: Re: Latest OED Additions
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On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:

> earliest example of this phrase. 1975 is the earliest example
> in the entry, with 1924 as the first quote for the sense as a
> whole. If you have something earlier for _play_ I'll happily
> put it in.

What I had was the 1969 Ehrlichman quote, already posted by Ben Zimmer
earlier today. It is interesting that Safire's New Political Dictionary
quotes Ehrlichman as saying the phrase appeared in a 1968 Wall Street
Journal article, but a ProQuest search fails to pull up such an article.

Fred Shapiro

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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press,
Yale Law School forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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