lox (smoked salmon) from 1668??

[Jonathan Lighter]

Doug is undoubtedly correct, yet OED does not enter the 17th C. _lox_ as a variant spelling of _lax_.

  _Lax_  in English must have been pronounced with more or less the vowel of "hat" from the very beginning; OE spellings demonstrate this. But the form _lox_ in 1668, if accurately transcribed, would indicate something rather different, perhaps ignorantly influenced by the unrelated _lock_, "a contrivance for fastening."

  JL

"Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Douglas G. Wilson"
Subject: Re: lox (smoked salmon) from 1668??
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>"1668 Cleveland's Old Gill ii, Her Breath smells like Lox, Or unwiped Nocks."
>
>Is this lox n.2, a kind of smoked salmon, first citation 1941??

Probably not exactly. But I think it might could be lax n.1, basically the
same word, first citation some time before the Deluge. There is an example
in SND from 1819 spelled with an "o".

-- Doug Wilson


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