OED's "rum" -- perhaps 1651?; and its misattributions to "Franklin's" Drinkers Dictionary

[Victor Steinbok]

NOT an antedating, but another GB lesson.

There is no such thing as "quick search" for "rum" in GB, as even the
earliest limiting dates offer thousands of hits--most misreadings of
Latin texts. But one jumps out

http://goo.gl/t2G6d

The tag claims 1586 and, in fact, so does the front page. But the type
is all wrong--it is simply too clean, the long-s is standardized and
shorter than it would have been that yearly. In fact, by the looks of
it, I would place the text in the mid-18th century or later (but before
1812). An enterprising reviewer left a note suggesting that he found
references to King George--yet another reason to doubt the authenticity
of the date. Poking around a bit more, I spotted on page 39 a line that
contains "this year, 1786". I have no doubt that this is indeed the
correct publication date.

GB does a poor enough job tagging dates of many documents not to have a
mere typo tossing another monkey wrench into the works. But this is
exactly what appears to have happened here. The date on the title page
is simply missing a pair of "C"s. I found several volumes in the past
with similar typos. In some instances, the missing "letter" is X or V.
This is the first to be off by 200 years.

As an afterthought, I checked the WorldCat, which indeed has the correct
date (as well as reproducing the wrong one).

     VS-)

On 3/24/2011 2:12 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> It's just too hard to keep track of this stuff.
>
> The brain is too small.
>
> JL

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