prophe(s/c)y again

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:31 PM -0400 10/24/07, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On 10/24/07, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>>  At 7:28 AM -0700 10/24/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>>  >ah, but we've been *here* before.  from Fred Shapiro, 3/26/05:
>>  >Despite having over 11,000 Google hits and being used  prominently in
>>  >Bob Dylan's landmark 1964 song "The Times They Are A-Changin'," the
>>  >word _prophesize_ is still not in OED or Merriam-Webster.
>>  >
>>  >and Jesse Sheidlower pointed out that it was in the OED, under
>>  >"prophecize".  now in 2007, the OED entry is for "prophesize", with
>>  >variant spellings: 18- prophecise, 18- prophesise, 18- prophesize,
>>  >19- prophecize.
>>  >
>>  And, as I learned before posting on "prophesize", the OED entry
>>  includes the Dylan line (along with a "prophecise" from 1816 and a
>>  "prophesize" from 1895).
>
>Sadly, though, OED doesn't include another lexical oddity from Dylan's
>1964 output, the eggcorn "scrapegoat" as used in "Ballad in Plain D"
>("The constant scrapegoat, she was easily undone / By the jealousy of
>others around her"). This would be difficult to include, actually,
>since it appears as "scapegoat" in the published lyrics.
>
>--Ben Zimmer
>
Ben is responsible for the "scrapegoat" entry in the eggcorn
database, which includes a commentary from "Mike" from a year ago
referencing a Time magazine article in Feb. 1964 in which Lee Harvey
Oswald's mother Marguerite accuses the CIA of making her son the
scrapegoat.

LH

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