Seen in thread on "fracket"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:50 AM, David Barnhart
<dbarnhart at highlands.com> wrote:
>
> The use of _live_ meaning in widespread or real speech and writing and of
> "in the wild" meaning approximately the same thing, are interesting terms.
>
> How far back do they appear in the contexts of linguistics?

I read Larry's comment, "I didn't hear it live myself," to refer to
the NPR broadcast -- so that would just be OED sense 10a, "heard or
watched at the time of its occurrence." Can't say that I've noticed
"live" being used in the sense you describe.

As for "in the wild," that figurative usage has long been a favorite
of urban folklorists. Here's one definition:

---
http://www.ulblog.org/urban-legend-definitions/
Urban Legend fans and researchers often talk about encountering one
story or another ‘in the wild’. This generally means that they
encountered the story while it was still in circulation and that it
was being communicated in a form in which the audience is encouraged
to believe that the story is true.
---

Here's an example from the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban from
1998 (in a thread also featuring our own Alice Faber):

---
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.urban/msg/a8bd2a6505a9594c
"Dead Guy in Sportscar," alt.folklore.urban, Dec. 24, 1998
I've never encountered this one in the wild, but it's featured in four of
the three Brunvand books (_The Vanishing Hitchhiker_, _The Choking
Doberman_, _The Mexican Pet_, and _The Baby Train_).
---

--Ben Zimmer

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