"jockey", 1632 [published 1637], antedates 1670-; also "masty"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 8/27/2010 06:13 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>There are some still earlier citations for "jockey" in EEBO.

I first came across the 1632/7 jockey in a secondary source, one
which is not in an on-line database.  And I don't have access to EEBO
at home, so I could not search it for better (earlier) quotations.


>I'm curious about this "interdating" thing: I am familiar with the
>concept, but it seems like it can easily be carried too far,
>particularly nowadays when online resources can readily yield lots
>of citations from targeted time periods.  Mathematically speaking,
>aren't 90% or more of all citations going to "interdate" the OED,
>i.e., all citations are interdatings unless they happen to have
>exactly the same date as an OED cite?  What is the goal -- to have a
>citation for every decade? every year?  Surely the OED does not aim
>to have citations as frequent or as voluminous as that, nor should
>anyone expect it to.

The "masty" is in the middle of a 67-year gap, which meets my
threshold.  I'll defer to Jesse re what he ingests.

Joel

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