Fictional Materials for OED

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 8:32 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > CNN this a.m.: "The technology does not exist! It's made of unobtainium!"
> >
>
> http://goo.gl/LN7zy6
>
> "This happens in the genre so often that there is even a generic word for
> it: unobtainium."
>
> Foreward (?) of E[dward] E[lmer] Smith, The Skylark of Space, 1928.

That introduction was written in 2001, unfortunately.

I wrote about "unobtainium" when the movie "Avatar" came out, and
noted that Paul Dickson's "Dictionary of the Space Age" dates it back
to 1958, in Woodford Heflin's "Interim Glossary, Aero-Space Terms":

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/at-the-movies-airworld-unobtainium/

Michael Quinion gives the same cite:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-uno1.htm

--bgz

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

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