Paul Dickson still thinks Benjamin Franklin collected the "Drinker's Dictionary"

[Seán Fitzpatrick]

“A Lie can be all over the Internet before the Truth has booted up his ISP.”

 

 

Seán Fitzpatrick

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
I blame Global Warming.
 <http://www.logomachon.blogspot.com/> http://www.logomachon.blogspot.com/

  _____  

From: Joel S. Berson [mailto:Berson at ATT.NET] 
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 1:49 PM
Subject: Paul Dickson still thinks Benjamin Franklin collected the
"Drinker's Dictionary"

 

Paul Dickson still thinks Benjamin Franklin collected the 228 terms for
intoxication of the Pennsylvania Gazette's 1737 "Drinker's Dictionary".  In
his 2009 Drunk: The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary, he writes (p. 8), "The
first person to ever collect and publish a sampling from the cornucopia of
English slang for drunkenness was Benjamin Franklin, who included 228 terms
for intoxication in his Drinker's Dictionary in 1737. ... Franklin published
his list ...".

My 2006 article -- "The Source for Benjamin Franklin's 'The Drinkers
Dictionary' (and Was It Mather Byles?)", American Speech, vol. 81, no. 2,
pp. 164--179 -- showed that a nearly identical but longer list, of 237
terms, was published by an unidentified writer in the New England Weekly
Journal on July 6, 1736, six months before Franklin's PG piece.  Franklin
merely reprinted the NEWJ list, with minor alterations and a few cuts,
although he wrote his own essay to accompany it.

As Robert Hume wrote in 1999, Once a factual error is in print [he could
have added or on the World Wide Web], it is virtually ineradicable, for it
will be picked up and repeated."

Joel

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