"Pannomion"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 06:04:49PM -0400, Fred Shapiro wrote:
>
> I have previously suggested that OED3 seems to be less interested than
> earlier editions of the OED in automatically including coinages of major
> authors.  Today I was reading Jeremy Bentham's letter of 30 Oct. 1811 to
> James Madison (one of the most arrogant letters ever written, by the way
> -- in it Bentham offered to write the laws of the United States himself).
> In that letter Madison uses the word _Pannomion_, referring to "a body of
> Statute law."  A Google search yields 374 hits.

...of which only 110 are in English. (The others are
references to Bentham in scholarship in other languages.)

> Why isn't a word like this in OED?

A lot of reasons, including that OED3 is indeed less
interested in automatically including coinages of major
writers, and that Bentham isn't as major a writer as
others. But mainly that this is just not very important. 110
Google hits is very small, and _all_ of those examples are
explicitly in reference to Bentham. If this were some
cornerstone of Bentham's philosophy, such that every mention
of Bentham referred to the word, it would be one thing. But
this is a minor term, of interest only to people interested in
this one letter of Bentham. It belongs somewhere, but not in
OED.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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