antedating?: "top dollar"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Well, that _is_ the last straw, isn't it ?

  But at least I found an antedating.

  JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: antedating?: "top dollar"
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On 4/23/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> OED has 1970, but Google Books cites an issue of _Trucking Business_ from
> no later than 1964:
>
> "With all that work you put in... Why aren't you drawing top dollar?"
>
> Google Books asserts that the latest issue they scanned is from that year.

Why would we believe anything Google Books asserts at this point?
Searching on years in that volume of _Trucking Business_ finds
references in nearby pages to a company's 1967 earnings and to
industry projections for 1968. So 1967 seems a more likely bet.


--Ben Zimmer

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