Why the OED is scant for the 18th century :-)

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Why the OED is scant for the 18th century  :-)
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>
> "... the British Museum's newspaper warehouse [was] Â in a suburb of
> London, crammed with irreplaceable files of eighteenth- and
> nineteenth-century journals. Â On October 20, 1940, it was bombed out,
> and for three days thereafter the exposed ruins were drenched with
> rain, with the result that some 30,000 volumes of newspapers were destroyed."
>
> Richard D. Altrick, The Scholar Adventurers (New York: The Macmillan
> Company, 1950), p. 235.
>
> Well, I suppose there are some books from the 18th century still at
> the British Museum. Â But this may account for the sparseness of
> 18th-century English newspaper files, such as the Burney Collection.
>
> Joel
>
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"The horror! The horror!" And I'm serious. I was reading just last
night that _Beowulf_ survives in only a single, partially-burned copy,
as also does, for instance, the Old Russian _Slovo o polku igoreve_.
Some scholars doubt the authenticity of the latter. But, given the
utter lack of any other evidence, it all boils down to "different
strokes for different folks."

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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