funny character in SF Citations for OED

Jesse Sheidlower jester at PANIX.COM
Fri Feb 1 20:11:50 UTC 2008


On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 07:55:22PM -0500, Mark Mandel wrote:
> Following up Jay Garmon's list of  *75 words every sci-fi fan should
> know*<http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=1093>I found the
> following sentence under "
> avatar <http://www.jessesword.com/sf/view/295>", in the last sentence in the
> Comment section:
>
> This source also supplied an incidental bonus: a use of the non-sf term
> > "online", which antedates the earliest cite in OED£ by one year.
>
>
> The character after "OED" is a "character unknown" glyph in UTF-8 view and a
> pound sterling symbol in ISO-8859-1 and Windows 1252.

In the process of fixing this, I took a look at the reference,
and it's simply wrong: there are three examples of _on-line_
in the cited 1986 source, all of which are clearly adjectives;
the OED's 1987 quote is the earliest for the equivalent adverb
sense. Our first adjective quote in this sense is 1979. Thus,
no antedate. I've fixed the SF page.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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