lawyer up antedating 1995-->1990

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 05:45:05AM -0500, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> http://bit.ly/cMkTIp
> Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns (*1992*, p. ??)
>> Was DeCaro about *to lawyer up*? O'Connor wasn't surprised, but it did
>> piss him off.
>
> The 1st edition of this book is listed as 1984, but the search of that
> book in GB gets no hits for "lawyer up" or any relevant parts of the
> text cited above.

I had previously looked at this; it seemed odd that this
phrase would occur in a book set in the small-town South in
1906. And indeed, as you might have guessed from the cover
image in Google Books, it's just a GB error: the text is not
from _Cold Sassy Tree_, but from Charles Bosworth's true-crime
_A Killer Among Us_ (1998), p. 142.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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