lawyer up antedating 1995-->1990

[Shapiro, Fred]

The 1994 court case is legitimate.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Victor Steinbok [aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2010 6:52 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: lawyer up antedating 1995-->1990

HighBeam seems to be highly unreliable. Along with 1990 article it also
returned a supposed 1991 article as well, but within the cited clip form
that article there is a date included from 2003--actually, a part of a
separate reference that somehow got mixed up into the one it reported. I
am certain that the 1991 piece does NOT contain the right phrase.

I'll see if I can figure out where the actual quote came from--if,
indeed, it's from Washington Post. Best I can tell from searching WaPo's
actual archives (instead of Google's HighBeam connection), the earliest
case of "lawyered up" in WaPo is from  May 1999, not from 1990. And the
internal archive search finds NO instances of "he lawyered up". I'll
ignore HighBeam results from now on.

I hope the other reference pans out (MJS 1993). The court case seems to
be legit--not from Google.

     VS-)

On 1/31/2010 6:34 AM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 05:45:05AM -0500, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
>> The earliest appears to be from WaPo, *Oct. 18, 1990*. Although the
>> quotation appears legitimate, I found that HighBeam metadata are far
>> less accurate than ProQuest.
>>
>>
>>> But when he was under oath before Congress, he *lawyered up*, saying:
>>> "I'm not ...
>>>
> [...]
>
>
>> I have little doubt about the 1990 citation, but it's worth verifying
>> more directly.
>>
> It's not real. The actual article that HighBeam returns for
> this search is indeed from the Wash Post on 18 Oct. 1990, but
> it does not contain this quote.
>
> I'm not sure where the quote is actually from.
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
> OED
>
>

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