early history of "glitch"

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

Very interesting item, both in WSJ and Ben's Word Routes follow-up.  It might now be good to run the item by the Jewish-Languages discussion group to see what the Yiddish mavens there have to say. If they agree, that would be the Better Crocker seal of approval.

Gerald Cohen

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Ben Zimmer [bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM], Monday, November 04, 2013 4:34 AM wrote:

The word "glitch" has been in the news thanks to HealthCare.gov, so I've
talked about it on NPR and in my WSJ column:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=240823227
http://on.wsj.com/glitchbz (if paywalled, try Google+ link:
http://bit.ly/glitchbzg)

I give the full historical treatment in my Word Routes followup:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-hidden-history-of-glitch/

I rely primarily on the antedatings supplied by Fred Shapiro and Stephen
Goranson on this list in July 2010, and I fill in the gaps with some of my
own finds. We already had examples from the world of radio from 1940 and
1948 (both found by Fred), and I add a 1943 cite. And we had a 1955 example
from television (found by Stephen), to which I add cites from 1953 and
1959. The latter two were from magazines archived on
americanradiohistory.com (Broadcasting and Sponsor). The site's search tool
appears to be broken, but I found the cites using a Google site search.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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