OED misdating -- LIFT

[Robin Hamilton]

OED LIFT v. sense 8 -- (slang) to steal - cites a letter from William
Fleetwood, Recorder of London, as dated 1595.

Fleetwood died in 1594, and the letter in question, which gives a remarkable
amount of detail about London criminals, was written in 1585:

            Fearinge that I trouble your Lordship with my tedious Lettres I
end, this vijth of Julie 1585

This misdating isn't trivial.  The OED first citation is from Skelton a.
1529, but this is an outlier, and as used in the citation by Skelton
probably represents the earlier SE sense, dating from the fourteenth
century, meaning to raise up.

The second OED citation is from Robert Greene in 1592.  The OED cites _A
Quip for an Upstart Courtier_, but Greene goes into the term in greater
detail, under Lifting Law, in _The Second Part of Cony-Catching_, in 1591, a
year earlier.

Effectively, the Fleetwood reference is the first appearance of a term
which, along with nip (to cut a purse) and foist (to pick a pocket), is
prominent in criminal cant in the late sixteenth century.

_Green's Dictionary of Slang_ notes an even earlier occurrence in Robert
Copland's _Highway to the Spital House_ (c. 1530).

Robin Hamilton 

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