[Ads-l] OED lacuna: "Kinsey scale"

[Ben Zimmer]

Earliest I see on Google Books (snippet view) is from 1954.

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https://books.google.com/books?id=LXRqAAAAMAAJ
Edmund Bergler and William S. Kroger, _Kinsey's Myth of Female Sexuality:
The Medical Facts_ (1954), p. 118
Approximately 13 per cent of the males who have had no overt homosexual
contacts after adolescence react erotically to other males. At least
incidental homosexual experiences or reactions (Kinsey scale 1 to 6), over
a minimum period of three years between the ages 16 to 25, have occurred in
30 per cent of all males.
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Kinsey just called it the "heterosexual–homosexual rating scale" in _Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male_ (1948).

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 10:58 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> I just came across a reference to the Kinsey scale, which is of course 'A
> classification system for gauging sexual orientation, designed by Alfred
> Kinsey, and ranging from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively
> homosexual)’ [—AHD; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale].
> That got me to wonder whether Alfred Kinsey himself first called it the
> Kinsey scale, but there’s no entry in the OED to check.  I know proper
> names themselves do not get entries in the OED, but derivatives (e.g.
> “American” as opposed to “America”) do, including eponyms like “Geiger
> counter”, “Einstein shift”, or for that matter “Richter scale” (which was
> apparently not so-called by Charles Francis Richter himself).  So “Kinsey
> scale” is probably just waiting for K’s turn in the revision cycle. My
> prediction is that Kinsey didn’t call it a Kinsey scale.  Now if it were
> Trump...
>
>

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