antedating?: "top dollar"

[Jeff Prucher]

--- Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: antedating?: "top dollar"
>
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>
> On 4/23/07, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> 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.

Assuming that Google is actually searching in the same issue when you use
"search in this book", the issue might be March 1968:
http://tinyurl.com/yprsp2.
But I'm not at all convinced that this is a reasonable assumption, since I was
also able to find a header for Feb. 1968 by searching around in the same issue.

There is another hit in Trucking Business for "top dollar", which is given as
"... tri times were cut by as much as 10 per cen Across-the-board benefits to
the drive the fleet operator and his customer. Top-dollar ..." on the results
page. The snippet shown, however, does not include any relevant text.  (What on
earth are they thinking?) That issue may be from 1967, but I've gotten headers
for both January and April of that year, so make of that what you will.

Jeff Prucher

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