verse

[Jonathan Lighter]

The office mate who talked about "the multiverse" in the mid-to-late '70s
was quite certain he'd coined the word himself. (He said so, and Moorcock
was never a topic of our conversations.)

His idea was that "multiverse" comprehended all posiible "parallel
universes."

Great minds think alike.

JL

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Robin Hamilton <
robin.hamilton3 at virginmedia.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton3 at VIRGINMEDIA.COM>
> Subject:      Re: verse
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This is impressionistic, but I've always felt that the "multi" part in
> Moorcock's "multiverse" was an echo of the first element of Isaac Asimov's
> coinage for a supercomputer (as we would now call it), "Multivac"
> [presumably because such a computer -- Asimov coined the term in the
> fifties, I think -- would have been constructed of MULTIple VACuum tubes.]
>
> In terms of dating, anyone writing SF in the sixties -- and especially a
> writer like Michael Moorcock who was among other things connected to _New
> Worlds_ magazine, and thus antagonistically aware of the tradition
> represented by John W. Campbell's _Astounding_/_Analogue_ and his stable of
> writers, among whom, famously, Isaac Asimov -- would have been familiar
> with
> Asimov's use of the term "Multivac".
>
> The multiverse concept/theme/idea/trope as Moorcock develops it in the
> course of his writing career is pretty much pervasive there, but probably
> most associated with the Jerry Cornelius sequence[s] of stories/novels.
>
> Robin
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Arnold Zwicky" <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2011 11:03 AM
> Subject: Re: verse
>
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail
> > header -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: verse
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > On Jan 20, 2011, at 7:40 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Amy West <medievalist at w-sts.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Michael Moorcock insists he's been using multiverse since the early 70s
> >>> (at least) and then there's the similarly-timed use of the term re:
> >>> Marvel (or is it DC) comics (though that may be from the 80s).
> >>
> >> Moorcock used it in 1963:
> >>
> >> http://www.jessesword.com/sf/view/70
> >
> > and this citation is in OED3 (Dec. 2009).
> >
> > amz
> >
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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