wild about Rappaccini's daughter

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:36 AM -0500 2/13/08, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 2/13/2008 09:38 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>OED has "wild," 11.c, from Jane Austen "a1817."  Yet it lacks any
>>U.S. exx. (as far as I can tell) and has no ex. constr. with "about"
>>till 1868.  Tsk.
>>
>>   1844 Nathaniel Hawthorne in _The United States Democratic
>>Review_  (Dec.) 549: You have heard of this daughter, whom all the
>>young men in Padua are wild about.
>
>Hmph!  How did I miss that in my thorough reading of all of
>Hawthorne's short stories about 5 years ago?  (I'm waiting anxiously
>for Hawthorne's "salt" = experienced sailor to enter OED3, antedating
>Dana's _Two Years Before the Mast_ by five years.)
>
>But a search of the OED2 CD-ROM turns up, under "stark, a. and adv.":
>
>a1721 Prior _Poems, Cromwell & Porter_ 281 You may study among the
>Law givers without being stark wild about Ordinances and Proclamations.
>
>Not American, though.
>
Nor is my privately published variant folio of Henry V (1599),
wherein the King, walking among the tents in disguise before
Agincourt, overhears Pistol acknowledging to Fluellen "I'm just wild
about Harry"...

LH

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