franchise

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 08:52:07AM -0500, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> OED offers a good def. of the now-ubiquitous "franchise":  "orig. *U.S.* A
> general title, format, or unifying concept used for creating or marketing a
> series of products (esp. films, television shows, etc.)."
>
> Its primary ex. is from the _N.Y. Times_ in 1936.  However, there follows a
> half-century gap and in 1988 the same NYT had to define the word for its
> readers.
>
> 1936 says, "Warner Brothers hold their G-Man franchise with ‘Public Enemy's
> Wife’ at the Strand."
>
> The uniquely early date, plus the tenor of "hold" (presumably "maintain")
> suggests to finicky me that the writer was simply playing facetiously off
> the established sense of an official authorization to trade in something,
>
> So I'd put the ex. in brackets - unless OED has a bunch of suppressed cites
> showing continuity of usage between 1936 and 1986.

We did puzzle over this, and no, we don't have any intervening cites (we
would have included them, had any been available). Still, I don't think
bracketing is the right solution here--the 1936 quote does represent the
sense in question, and the fact that this sense didn't really catch on
for fifty years doesn't really matter. The quotation paragraph shows
that there's a gap, and that seems good enough to me; other
possibilities might be to have an explicit note saying "Quot. 1936 is
uniquely early" or "Not in general use until the 1980s" or the like. I
also think there's a reasonable chance that there are other quotes out
there, it's just a sense that's hard to find.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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