molest, n.

[Dan Goncharoff]

this doesn't answer your question, but "drunk and disorderly" goes back a
while, at least to early 19th C. in England, if I recall.

DanG


On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 8:12 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: molest, n.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I'm wondering, though, whether legal parlance has a distinctive tendency to
> nominalize words, whether by clipping or plain function shift.  In Georgia,
> at least, there is a crime named "drunk and disorderly" (not "drunkenness
> and disorder"):  "He was charged with drunk and disorderly last night."
>  Similarly with "snatch and grab"?
>
> --Charlie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of
> Arnold Zwicky [zwicky at STANFORD.EDU]
> Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 7:49 PM
>
> On Jun 27, 2011, at 4:38 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>
> > I don't understand -- GB shows several usages of "sexual molest" before
> > 1990, the earliest in 1967. They are all snippets, and several are
> > periodicals, so I cannot verify the dates, but it would indicate usage
> > before 1994.
>
> that's still a hundred years after the previous OED cite.  my point was
> that the old usage of the noun "molest" died out in the 19th century, and
> that what we have now is a fresh creation (by clipping).
>
> i'll revise my posting to make this clear.
>
> arnold
>
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