Antedating of "MILF"

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Jesse Sheidlower wrote
> My standards for _The F-Word_ aren't the same as those of the OED, so my
> acceptance of something in the former doesn't mean that similar
> standards would be accepted by OED bibliographers. I hope that they'll
> accept the 1992 date in the 1995 paper that Garson found, but I'm not
> sure.

Trying to push the 1995 date back to 1992: Laurel A. Sutton presented
her research at a conference in April 1992, and the Proceedings has
her 13 page paper, The title matches the chapter name in the 1995
book. Here is a link to a web page that lists information about the
conference and the paper:

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/BWLG/Conf92.html

[Begin excerpt]
Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference
The second Women and Language Conference was held on April 4th and
5th, 1992, in Berkeley, California.
The conference proceedings were edited by Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz,
and Birch Moonwomon.

Laurel A. Sutton, Bitches and skankly hobags: The place of women in
contemporary slang: 560-572
[End excerpt]

Google Books contains the 1992 Proceedings "Locating Power" (which
seems to be two volumes). There is a match that displays a snippet
with the paper title. But I cannot coax GB to match "MILF" or its
definition. It is possible that the Proceedings version of the paper
did not include the Appendix with MILF. Alternatively, the match is
absent because the GB database has bad scans, missing scans, corrupted
data, poor OCR etcetera.

http://books.google.com/books?id=osEbAQAAIAAJ&q=Bitches#search_anchor

Ben: Thanks for your compliment, and thanks for providing the name of
Sutton's chapter.

Garson

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