OED Appeals list (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Charles Doyle]

A general note about proverbs in the OED (though I'm not sure where the 1971 date for "There is a rotten/bad apple in every barrel" comes from):

The OED's coverage of proverbs has always been sketchy. The original contributors seem to have had various notions about the status of proverbs (and other set phrase) in the lexicon of the language; the glorious inclusiveness of the search for words contrasted with a slightness and randomness in the coverage of proverbs.  There was also the fact of editorial caprice: A proverb would appear within the entry for some arbitrarily chosen word from the expression--sometimes more than one--usually without cross references. Therefore, finding a given proverb in the OED was itself a difficult task, prior to electronic searchability.

In short, for early datings of proverbs, the OED is not the authority of choice!

For example, the saying "There is a rotten/bad apple in every barrel": The 1971 date could easily have been pushed back by a quick look at B. J. Whiting's _Modern Proverbs_, in print since 1989; there, the proverb appears in a quotation from 1960 (A112). That entry is then referred to in Wolfgang Mieder's _Dictionary of American Proverbs_ (1992: 24), which mentions the 1960 dating. And now we are happy to have earlier instances!

--Charlie
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>>On 6/21/07, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC <Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:

there is a rotten/bad apple in every barrel: antedate 1971

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