Antedating of "selfie"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 10:20 PM, hw gray wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> With "selfie" being named Oxford's Word of the Year, the 2002 cite
>
> 29 January 1996 News Archive | Mail Online - Daily Mail
>
> www.dailymail.co.uk =E2=80=BA Home =E2=80=BA 1996 =E2=80=BA January=E2=80=
> =8E
>
> _Jan 29, 1996_ - Monday 29 January 1996. Bing. Site Web Enter .... Caroline
> Flack posted a _selfie_ of herself and two of her colleagues and All eyes
> on h

You can't always trust the dates assigned to web pages by Google. On
news sites, sometimes the date for a main article also gets assigned
to more recent text that also happens to be on the page when Google
crawled it. In this case, Google crawled this page:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/sitemaparchive/day_19960129.html

...which had a column of teases to recent Daily Mail articles
including this one from July 2013:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2354859/Caroline-Flack-flashes-cleavage-posts-selfie-colleague-putting-mic-on.html

So 9/13/02 is still the date to beat.

--bgz

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

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