Antedating of "United States" and "United States of America"

[Shapiro, Fred]

In the posting below I pointed out that the Christian Science Monitor reported an antedating of the term "United States of America" back to April 1776.  Now I see that the CSM subsequently reported a further antedating of "United States of America" back to a 2 January 1776 letter by an aide to George Washington:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2013/0704/Who-coined-United-States-of-America-Mystery-might-have-intriguing-answer

Note that the provenance of this letter, discovered by the same person who made the earlier discovery, is not described at all.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Shapiro, Fred [fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2013 3:37 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Antedating of "United States" and "United States of America"

I'm not sure whether the entry for "United States" will survive the revision of the OED, since I believe geographical names are now considered out of scope by OED.  In any case, the geographical names "United States" and "United States of America" are clearly important.  OED has 1776, I think the fall of 1776, as their earliest citation for "United States" (missing a minor document published on July 4 of that year), and 1778 as their earliest citation for "United States of America."

William Safire, in his "On Language" column of March 29, 1998, discussed a number of June 1776 usages of "United States of America."  Now the Christian Science Monitor reports the discovery of an April 1776 usage of that term:

http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/cgi-bin/amarch/getdoc.pl?/var/lib/philologic/databases/amarch/.14340

I would suggest that the correctness of this document's dating be studied before it is accepted as an antedating.

Fred Shapiro

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org