Further Antedating of "Smog"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Dec 18 03:42:56 UTC 2011


On Dec 17, 2011, at 10:21 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
>> "_Smog_"Â  ... _combined of smoke and fog_ ...
>
> This definition was still so widely accepted that, during my youth in
> the '50's, it was routinely rebutted as inexact in articles about the
> "smog" of Los Angeles.
>
Of course that's because nobody back then had read The Hobbit, or we'd have realized it was a portmanteau of "smoke" and and "Smaug".

LH

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