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

[Laurence Horn]

> On Feb 14, 2018, at 12:41 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Earliest I see on Google Books (snippet view) is from 1954.
> 
> ----
> 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.
> ----
> 
> Kinsey just called it the "heterosexual–homosexual rating scale" in _Sexual
> Behavior in the Human Male_ (1948).

Yes, I inferred that, but who knows when it was first named in his honor.  Bergler & Kroger seem to presuppose the label rather than propose it in the above passage.

LH
> 
> 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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