breadcrumbs

[Charles C Doyle]

In his recent posting George remarks, "The OED could bury all superseded published entries in full,
leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for anyone interested in finding them . . . ."  That expression has become ubiquitous, but it's noteworthy that in the famous Grimm Brothers' version of "Hansel and Gretel," to which the saying presumably alludes, the trail of breadcrumbs could NOT be followed.

--Charlie


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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of George Thompson [george.thompson at NYU.EDU]
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 10:53 AM
Subject:      Re: The OED's "Publication history"
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Some years ago, I went to a special library that had kept the original
fascicles of the OED, to confirm that the passage from Jane Austen's early
novel using the words "base ball" was there, and the year of publication.
 It was, so there was documentation that there was a game called "baseball"
in the very early 19th C, widely available before the Abner Doubleday hoax
was launched.

But this "what did they know, and when did they know it" question is much
harder to answer with an on-line file that's open to snout-to-tail revision
and general fiddling.  An OED entry can carry a note to the effect "first
drafted in 1998, revised in 2007", but that won't tell us whether the
definition was rephrased, or some early citations added or what exactly was
done in 2007.  The OED could bury all superseded published entries in full,
leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for anyone interested in finding them, but
that will get to be a complicated tangle in the decades to come.

Not many people will care, but I can imagine controversies of more
significance than the prehistory of baseball that might hinge on whether
due diligence in 2005 could have uncovered that a word had a certain
meaning.

(Actually, I can't imagine a controversy of more significance than the
prehistory of baseball -- that was just a rhetorical posture.)

GAT

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