M-W and "fantab ulous"

[Jonathan Lighter]

My quibble is that the writer seems to belong to the "dictionary-is-only-for-'real'-words" school.  Which is probably the school that most of the audience is attending.

  JL

RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: RonButters at AOL.COM
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20=A0=20=A0=20=A0=20Re:=20M-W=20and=20"fantab?
= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?ulous"?=
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In a message dated 1/19/06 10:47:39 AM, jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM writes:


> > A minute or two on Proquest finds the word in a Chicago Tribune ad for
> > Delta-C&S Airlines from June 23, 1953, with three additional exx in
> > Joan Winchell's LA Times column from 1955-56. Newspaperarchive turns
> > up another half dozen exx from 1956.
> >
> > I'm sensing that the newsletter writer might be a bit out of the loop
> > at the M-W office...
> >
> >
> > --Ben Zimmer
>

PLEASE! So she missed an antedating by three or four years. This hardly means
that she--or M-W has written something worth complaining about.

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