correction "Murphy's Law" 1943, not

Thu Oct 15 17:03:58 UTC 2009

This is a problem that medievalists have faced since, well, forever.
Reliance on print versions of medieval works without checking the manuscript
itself or a good facsimile of the MS is a recipe for disaster. Editorial
intervention will inevitably change the work. Even well-edited print
versions will omit information or be otherwise misleading. In some important
respects, distribution of information in the age of the internet resembles
that of the pre-Gutenberg world.

(It never occurred to me that someone might cite Google Books or
Newspaperarchive without looking at the page images.)

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Shapiro, Fred
Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 8:30 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: *correction* "Murphy's Law" 1943, not

Ron's points are well-taken.  It is true that the particular "Murphy's Law"
problem was something that would have come up if the letter in question was
found with traditional research using printed materials.  But, speaking as
someone who uses Google Books a lot for historical-lexicographical research
and whose wife is a library researcher for the OED who is often asked to
verify citations from Google Books, I would say that GB does have
significant problems that are not easily verified from title pages online.
GB is fully capable of attaching title pages and texts that don't belong
together, and does that not infrequently.

On balance, GB is more of a boon than a curse.  If the etymology of "whole
nine yards" or "Murphy's Law" is ever solved, it will almost certainly be
because Google Books or Newspaperarchive or some other large database
happens to add the right book or newspaper or journal to its coverage.  My
long-run fear, though, is that the allure and convenience of these databases
is so great, and the economics of the alternative methods of research
(research libraries of print materials) so problematic, that familiarity
with print-based historical research will become a lost art and eventually
few people will even be aware that there is a universe of print publications
of which online versions are imperfect reproductions.

Fred Shapiro

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
ronbutters at aol.com [ronbutters at aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 9:37 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: *correction* "Murphy's Law" 1943, not

You all deserve high praise for this splendid work. I'm delighted to see
ADSL used in this way.

Google books is usually not that difficult to verify. The reported dates of
publication may be wrong (as Geoff Nunberg noted in reference to the
frequent "1899" mistake. But the books that have pdf access also invariably
have title pages with publication dates. Rather than patronizingly  berating
the rich online resources as Nunberg did, I think most of us would agree
that these online sources have revolutionized scholarship in historical
lexcographical research. In fact, the problem with date verification in this
case had nothing to do with any error in Google Books' dating, right? That
is, the same problem would have arisen had the source been discovered in the
time-consuming old-fashioned way--by actually reading a book.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
Date:         Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:06:10
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] *correction* "Murphy's Law" 1943, not

Thanks to Stephen for tracking this down.

The implications of the way this story turned out are quite fascinating.
First of all, it is sobering to realize that the OED, although more wedded
to documented and dated citations than almost any other human institution,
does often print citations from letters or diaries or journals that were
published much later, essentially assuming that the source materials were
reprinted verbatim.  As a result, some percentage of those citations must be
based on a wrong assumption of dating.  Secondly, it is very sobering to
realize that in the future everyone may base historical research on Google
Books, which often messes up dating and editions, without doing anything
close to the kind of checking that Stephen did.  Fifty years from now how
many people will have the critical instincts to question what they get from
online databases?  Thirdly, the way this story turned out is quite a tribute
to the experience and instincts of a historical lexicographer such as Jon
Lighter.  Jon immed!
 iately sensed that the 1943 citation was "too good to be true," and his
instincts were completely vindicated.  In the quotation realm, I often
dismiss an attribution to Mark Twain without giving it a second thought,
because my experience tells me that a certain kind of attribution of a
certain kind of quotation to a certain kind of author is almost always
bogus.  Datings from Google Books or Newspaperarchive of a term much earlier
than any other known evidence should always be double-checked, such as by
looking at the date printed as part of the image of the newspaper page.

Fred Shapiro

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Stephen
Goranson [goranson at DUKE.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 5:22 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: *correction* "Murphy's Law" 1943, not

As some recall, I posted from Google Books a published letter dated 1943
containing "Murphy's Law." Long story short, and as Jonathan Lighter,
Historical
Dictionary of American Slang editor, and others, suspected, the author added
that when transcribing his letter years later, he told me.

Thanks to Jon, Fred, Bill, Dave, Joel, Ben, Jesse, and to the author
Bill Sabel and his son Doug, for a variety of helps in getting this cleared
up.

For those still interested, that leaves the trail of usage of the
collocation
"Murphy's Law" spoken by Caltech theoretical physicist, mathematician, and
military consultant Howard Percy "Bob" Robertson, in an interview with
psychologist Anne Roe some time from January 27, 1949 (his 46th birthday,
"age
46" recorded at the interview) and probably before March 16, 1949 (based on
a
Dec. 16, 1948 letter offering an interview within 3 months). The evidence is
in
Anne Roe's publications, her papers at the American Philosophical Society
archive in Philadelphia, and his papers in the Caltech archive.

Who will antedate 1949?

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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