[Ads-l] Antedating of "The Establishment"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Kind of like Emerson's "do your thing" (1841).

JL

On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 8:32 AM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> The OED's first use for _establishment_, 8.b., is dated 1923.  This is the
> sense: "a social group exercising power generally, or within a given field
> or institution, by virtue of its traditional superiority, and by the use
> esp. of tacit understandings and often a common mode of speech, and having
> as a general interest the maintenance of the status quo."  The OED entry
> identifies a 1955 article by Henry Fairlie as the locus classicus of this
> sense.
>
>
> Fairlie himself later (in the New Yorker, 19 Oct. 1968) traced use of "the
> establishment" in this sense to a 9 Dec. 1841 lecture by Ralph Waldo
> Emerson, titled "The Conservative."
>
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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