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

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

"Kinsey's scale" is a likely precursor to "Kinsey scale". I searched
for "Kinsey's scale" in the HathiTrust database and found the
following match in a book with a 1952 date. However, the book was
published in multiple editions with different dates, so the 1952 date
might be incorrect. Hardcopy verification is required.

Year: 1952
Title: Conditioned reflex therapy; the direct approach to the
reconstruction of personality.
Author: Andrew Salter
Quote Page 278 (match in HathiTrust)

[Excerpt from Internet Archive copy of Salter text which has a 1949
date. The publisher seems to be "Creative Age Press" and that seems to
be the 1949 copyright edition]
…each history." 5 Most of the men seeking therapy for homosexuality
will score from 5 to 6 on Kinsey's scale. Were we to use this score as
a basis, and this too has its weaknesses, 8.0 per cent of the total…
[End excerpt]



On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 1:04 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> 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...
>>>
>>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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