Major Antedating of "Gross National Product"

[Shapiro, Fred]

The main area where traditional random reading for citations still has great value, I assume, is for building up data for occurrences of specific senses of words.  Database searching may be of no use for finding a specific sense of a common word.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Joel S. Berson [Berson at ATT.NET]
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 6:52 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Major Antedating of "Gross National Product"

Regardless of whether the 1923 quotation is really 1923, the coin
that Fred points to has a second side, although certainly at a lower
rate of discovery.  I am not advocating searching for specific words
by reading books.  But serendipitous discoveries via actual reading
can turn up antedatings that the search engines do not find -- the
false negatives.  This is not infinitesimally rare with one of my
(and Fred's, I suspect) favorite arenas of reading, Early American
Newspapers.  Nor I suspect with the optically-scanned early book databases.

Joel

At 7/6/2012 04:53 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>This is a powerful example of the difference between
>online-database-assisted antedating and traditional methods.  There
>are many other pre-1947 occurrences in JSTOR.
>
>
>gross national product (OED 1947)
>
>1923 John R. Commons in _American Economic Review_ 13: Supplement
>112 (JSTOR)  The National Bureau of Economic Research has started
>the accurate measurement of our gross national product and its
>distribution into national income.
>
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
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>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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