a late WOTY entrant: "Shopdropping"

[Dan Goodman]

Laurence Horn wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      a late WOTY entrant:  "Shopdropping"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> No, it doesn't relate to shopping until one drops.  Rather, according
> to a front-page article in today's Times,
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/us/24shopdrop.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
>
> it's "reverse shoplifting", characterized by "surreptitiously putting
> things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out".
> Motivations vary.  (See also http://shopdropping.net/, where you will
> learn that the verb "shopdrop" also exists, although I suspect it may
> be a back-formation.

 From the Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base (http://isfdb.org):
Title: The Shopdropper
Author: Alan Nelson
Year: 1955
Type: SHORTFICTION

Publications:

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1955, (Jan 1955,
Anthony Boucher, Fantasy House, Inc., $0.35, 132pp, Digest, magazine)
Cover: Nick Solovioff
Great Science Fiction About Doctors, (1963, Groff Conklin, Noah D.
Fabricant, Collier Books, #AS 518, $0.95, 412pp, pb, anth)

I suspect the term's been reinvented, rather than picked up from an
obscure, decades-old science fiction story.

--
Dan Goodman
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