Quote: he only lamented, that he had but one life to lose for his country (Nathan Hale 1799)

[Victor Steinbok]

My impression was that this is a late decision. Older entries retain the
practice of using the publication date. This is one reason why I
sometimes give three dates in my citations--the date in the diary (if
one can be discerned) or the latest date the diary covers, the date of
publication of first edition (if one cannot be found, but there is
reason to believe the passage is unchanged) and the date of the cited
edition (if different from first edition).

I am not even sure that OED uses double-date-tagging this way--from what
I can see, the date in parentheses is the date of the specific cited
publication that gives an indirect citation to another publication that
was not directly consulted (by the OED editors). So it could be an 1845
reprint of 1699 book that includes a 1683 diary. Then the date is listed
as 1699 (1845), not 1683 (1699).

Perhaps I am mistaken on this count, but this is what I discovered when
I came across the original publications under these circumstances. Pepys
generally gets only one date--of the original diary. Perhaps because
there is still access to MS.

     VS-)

On 4/22/2012 2:54 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
> In fact the OED generally dates diaries, journals, and letters by the date of composition, with the date of publication indicated in parentheses.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Victor Steinbok [aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2012 12:49 PM
>
> ...
> I have a greater concern about dates of illustration quotes in the OED
> where a diary is cited according to a publication date rather than the
> stated date of the original recording. I suppose, those date can be
> faked and notes postdated, but that's the case with publication dates as
> well (plenty of nontrivial typos on title pages). But, other than Pepys,
> all citations seem to be for publication dates.
>
>       VS-)

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