More on early txtng

[Joel S. Berson]

I trust that *at least* by the X this appears in the NY X, my find
will no longer be a footnote but fully incorporated into the body of
the article -- which will include the full verse with its
side-by-side translation.

:-)

P.S.  I have posted a comment at The Guardian's article on the
British Library exhibit.

Joel

At 8/20/2010 02:30 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 1:44 AM, Ben Zimmer
><bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >>
> >> At 2:20 PM -0400 8/19/10, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> >> >At 8/19/2010 02:08 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >> >>Sorry, it's 1832, "To Miss Catherine Jay, of Utica"
> >> >
> >> >Good enough to put down the British Library, being before their 1867.
> >> >
> >> Yup, by a generation. Back when I posted this in 2002, I was
> >> wondering if anyone else had other examples of alphanumeric
> >> proto-texting of the "b4" type from the early 19th c. but nobody
> >> responded.  Of course the quest is still open, and now the prize is
> >> to see by how many years we can antedate those Brits!  (It wouldn't
> >> surprise me if someone found other examples from the newspapers of
> >> the 1820s, when the "O.K." fad was in full flower.)
> >
> > My latest Word Routes column takes this light-verse tradition back to
> > 1828, but finds its origins in the UK, not the US. Our KTJ of UTK
> > (Katie Jay of Uticay) is trumped by their LNG of Q (Ellen Gee of Kew)
> > and MLE K of UL (Emily Kay of Ewell). Read all about it:
> >
> > http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2398/
> >
> > Links therein:
> >
> > "Dirge, to the Memory of Miss Ellen Gee of Kew" (New Monthly
> Magazine, 1828)
> > http://books.google.com/books?id=TScAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA360
> >
> > "Elegy to the Memory of Miss Emily Kay (Cousin to Miss Ellen Gee of
> > Kew)" (New Monthly Magazine, 1828)
> > http://books.google.com/books?id=TScAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA452
> >
> > Horace Smith's version of "Elegy" (The Midsummer Medley for 1830)
> > http://books.google.com/books?id=hDJIAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA226
> >
> > "To Miss Catharine Jay of Utica" (Atkinson's Casket, 1832)
> > http://books.google.com/books?id=SpfPAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA3-PA480
> >
> > The 1828 "Elegy" can be found several times in the Early American
> > Newspapers database, so it's very likely that it helped kickstart the
> > American initialism-play fad of the 1830s.
>
>Oops -- I managed to write that whole thing forgetting that the
>example Joel found ("Ingenious Conceit") was published fifteen years
>earlier, in 1813. So perhaps those 1828 verses weren't so influential
>after all. Sorry about that -- I've appended a note to the column.
>
>--bgz
>
>
>--
>Ben Zimmer
>http://benzimmer.com/
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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