[Ads-l] "Dead-tree"

[Ben Zimmer]

Nice citations in the Wiktionary entry, taking the noun back to '85 and the
adjective to '86. That antedates the OED (Mar. '07 draft addition to the
"dead" entry), which has the noun from '91 and the adjective from '95. The
edit history shows our own Hugo VK contributed the '85 cite.

1985 Jul 23: Thomas Johnsson, DECUS public domain C compiler: where can I
get it? (signature), net.lang.c
"Mail on dead trees: Dept. of CS, Chalmers University of Technology, S-412
96 Goteborg, Sweden"

1986 Apr 15: Barry Shein, Re: job control, net.unix-wizards
"My question is basically do you need better on-line programs to search the
docs ..., or actually different dead-tree style."

On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 4:48 PM Barretts Mail <mail.barretts at gmail.com>
wrote:

> It sounds normal to me, but perhaps is losing currency as a new generation
> grows up in which non-dead-tree forms are not novel.
>
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dead_tree#English <
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dead_tree#English>
> https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dead_tree <
> https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dead_tree>
>
> BB
>
> > On 27 Oct 2018, at 13:45, Parish, James <jparish at SIUE.EDU> wrote:
> >
> > This may have been discussed on-list before; if so, my apologies.
> >
> > On Wednesday, I posted a take-home midterm for one of my classes, and
> > informed the students that I would accept "either electronic or
> > dead-tree" versions of their work. They found "dead-tree" vastly
> > amusing, and my attempt to justify my use of the words even more so.
> > (The phrase "perfectly standard... slang" played a role.)
> >
> > In some of the circles I move in, "dead-tree" is the usual adjective
> > used to describe non-electronic texts. I don't know, however, how
> > widespread the use is. What say you?
>
>

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