[Ads-l] "Prolific" = 'important, influential'?

[Peter Reitan]

Prolific sales.
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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Dave Hause <dwhause at CABLEMO.NET>
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2019 11:01:02 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: "Prolific" = 'important, influential'?

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Subject:      Re: "Prolific" = 'important, influential'?
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I wonder if this sense of "prolific" could actually be a misapprehension of
"prolix"?
Dave Hause

-----Original Message-----
From: Laurence Horn
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2019 9:10 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "Prolific" = 'important, influential'?

>From an obit for Harold Bloom in this morning’s Yale Daily News,
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/10/15/harold-bloom-dies-at-89/

==========
Over his lifetime, Bloom amassed several honors and awards — including a
MacArthur Genius Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Award — and
edited hundreds of anthologies. Some of his more prolific books include “The
Anxiety of Influence,” “The American Religion” and “How to Read and Why,”
all of which have been translated into languages across the globe.
==========

Maybe just a malapropism rather than a SOTA, you ask? Google hits retrieved
for “prolific book” are all reasonable:

Prolific book critic (which of course Bloom was)
Prolific book reviewer
Prolific book publisher
Prolific book collector
Prolific book illustrator
Prolific book thief

But then I tried “prolific books”, and sure enough, the first page of hits
includes

The year has seen the release of some soon-to-be-prolific books that are
bound to help navigate us through our socio-political climates
Of course, there have always been writers working to dismantle racism (the
prolific books of James Baldwin and Angela Davis come to mind)
one of the most prolific books on this list
Such prolific books as Gulliver's Travels and Tom Jones
People like Lloyd Alexander wrote great, prolific books, over a long period
of time, and all because they were short.


Where “prolific” seems to mean ‘wordy’, ’widely read/sold’,
‘important/famous’, or 'written by a prolific author’.

Not in OED, needless to say.

LH

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