"laying a predicate"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Chris Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:13:24 -0400, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> >
> > How about an idiom blend of "lay the groundwork" + "set a precedent" with
> > a bonus malapropism?
>
> Hm, not sure here. A Google search for "laying|lay|laid|lain a precedent"
> (including quotes) yields only about 1/3 of the number of the results of
> "laying|lay|laid|lain a predicate" -McCain . (The proportion jumps to 1:10
> unless we exclude 'McCain'.) Many of them are lawyerly and some of them are
> old. See http://tinyurl.com/5da95b (1895m if I'm not mistaken). To my
> untrained ear it sounds like the same meaning as 'set a precedent', but we
> should probably ask a lawyer if this is legitimate jargon.

Ah, thanks for that -- I was unfamiliar with the legal usage. OED sense 4 for
"predicate" ("U.S. Law. A basis or foundation on which something rests") has
this cite from 1845:

---
1845 U.S. Rep. (U.S. Supreme Court) 44 32 An incomplete claim to land under
Spanish authority, was admitted in evidence..for the purpose of laying a
predicate, from which it was presumed that [etc.].
---


--Ben Zimmer

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