[Ads-l] "primary", verb: to challenge in a primary election

[Ben Zimmer]

"Primary" as a verb has come up many times on the list, as recently as
January when James Landau posted about it.

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2021-January/158790.html

Repeating what I said then:

The OED3 entry for "primary" v., sense 3 (trans.) "to oppose in a
primary election,"
has cites back to 1958, and intransitive "primarying" goes back even
earlier.

I provided the earliest known cites used by the OED for both transitive and
intransitive "primary" in a 2008 post:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2008-October/085065.html

On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 8:06 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I first encountered this more than a year ago but paid little attention.
>
> JL
>
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 7:42 PM Mark Mandel <markamandel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From today's *Daily Kos*, a Philadelphia progressive news web daily:
> >
> > >>>>>
> > *NY Democrats just made history with one of the most progressive policy
> > victories in generations*
> > *Apr 12, 2021 1:01am Eastern Daylight Time *
> > <https://tinyurl.com/4tjmsr2t>
> >
> > ...
> > But the tide has been quietly turning since in 2018, when a band of
> > progressives primaried members of the IDC, a group of turncoat former
> > Democrats that caucused with and gave a majority to the GOP. The
> > progressives won six of eight of those primaries, enabling actual
> Democrats
> > to win back control of the State Senate that fall.
> > <<<<<
> >
> > Incidentally, "six of eight of those primaries" seems excessively
> analytic,
> > in place of the more usual construction "six of those eight primaries".
> > True, neither number had been previously mentioned, but this construction
> > is open to interpretation as "We [the authors] chose [cherry-picked?]
> eight
> > of the primaries involved, and *six of those eight* were won by the
> > progressive challengers."
> >
>

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