Genoise -- 1838

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/8/2011 11:52 AM, victor steinbok wrote:
>Several comments.
>
>1) I did not try to antedate "Genoise". Given the lack of an OED lemma
>entirely, I simply grabbed what I thought to be a fairly early
>instance. I would actually expect the date to be pushed down to the
>pre-revolutionary period.

I simply grabbed an earlier instance -- of the dessert, not the place
name.  I should have added that I was looking in EAN or 19th C. U.S.
Newspapers, and I could not push it back to the (U.S.)
pre-revolutionary period -- 1838 was the earliest I found.

>2) I am not sure if a purely French menu can be considered integrated
>use.

Nor am I -- but I leave it to the mavens to decide whether it does or
doesn't rate a bracket.

>In a sense, it fails even the "mention" standard that is
>characteristic of Marasca citations, for example. I welcome it, but a
>dictionary might not, since the words are not being placed in English
>context.
>
>3) The task with Genoise is particularly difficult because of a
>confluence of several factors. First, the traditional spelling comes
>with diacritics, which makes OCRed versions less likely to be picked
>up correctly. Even without the diacritics, once you wonder into the
>long-s territory (pre-1808, roughly), OCR is likely to mess it up.
>And, to top it off, the spelling appears to be fairly creative,
>although the French version is clear enough. But there is also
>Genovese, Genoese and, the Punch misspelling, Genvoise. So it's not an
>easy task.

And too much work for me to search through the many occurrences where
"Genovese" and "Genoese" are place names.

Joel

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