Genoise -- 1838

[Victor Steinbok]

Just to be clear--I was not criticizing Joel for his methods or for the
find. Both are perfectly valid. If anything, I was expressing
frustration about my own search, using Joel's post as an example of one
has to deal with. No defense necessary.

     VS-)

On 4/8/2011 5:14 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> 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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