Soonest = as soon as

[Landau, James]

Ben Zimmer quotes the OED:

<quote>
soon, adv.
 III. In the superlative form soonest.
    14. a. Most quickly, readily, etc. Now freq. (orig. telegraphese),
as soon as possible.
[...]
1962 J. HAY in E. Queen's 16th Mystery Annual 163 'Bjornsson and whale
to proceed soonest to Regensburg and await further orders,' Twentypenny
cabled Hawker. 
<quote>

I read that story, not in the Annual but in Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine before it was reprinted in the annual.  That means it may have
appeared in the magazine in 1960 or 1961.  In case you're interested, it
was either a preposterous spy story or a dead-pan spy-story spoof, and
was such a bad story that it stuck in my mind.  The plot had a man who
used the alias "Colonel Twentypenny" who was ordered to get a rocket
scientist and a sample of his rocket fuel out of Czechoslovakia, so he
acquired a refrigerated whale carcass and took it into Czechoslovakia as
a cultural exchange exhibit, loaded the scientist and several TONS of
his rocket fuel into the carcass, turned off the refrigeration, and
waited for the Czechs to boot the exhibit and its odor out of the
country, of course without bothering to inspect it.  Two other (useless)
quotes from that story, both from memory so they may not be exact: "It
doesn't matter if you call yourself MI Five and a Half" and "Like the
American pork packers who use all of the pig except the squeal, British
whalers use all of the whale except the spout."

OT:  If anyone wants, I have a cite of "prepone" from 1978 written by
someone who lived in Rhode Island and probably was a native of the US.

Wilson Gray wrote:
<quote>
Case A: Male African-American Latino speaker from Buffalo:

"And, from there, it _especulated_ into a confrontation."

I assume that the speaker had what a German friend of mine used to call
"a schwer English wort" handy and that, unconcerned with meaning, he
just tossed it into his testimony in an effort to impress the judge with
his erudition.
</quote>

There is also the possibility that the speaker simply meant to say
"escalated".

I find it odd to see a person referred to as "African-American Latino".
Are you implying that he speaks AAVTM (African-American Vernacular
Tex-Mex)?

James A. Landau
test engineer
Northrop-Grumman Information Technology
8025 Black Horse Pike, Suite 300
West Atlantic City NJ 08232 USA 

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