[Ads-l] Digs: mystery citation?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2022 at 09:05:35AM -0400, dave at wilton.net wrote:
> 
> The OED (old entry), Green's, and virtually every other secondary source all list the following as the first use of "diggings" to mean lodgings:
>  
> 1838 J. C. Neal Charcoal Sketches II. 119 (Farmer) I reckon it's about time we should go to our diggings.
>  
> But when I look at all the digitized editions of "Charcoal Sketches" that I can find online (HathiTrust, Google Books, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, newspaper databases, etc.) nothing even remotely similar to this quotation appears anywhere in any of them, at least not that I can find. Neal's work appeared in three volumes over a decade or more, but I'm drawing a blank on all of them.
>  
> The "Farmer" would appear to be a reference to Farmer & Henley's Slang and Its Analogues, which has this exact citation. (It could also be a reference to Farmer's earlier Dictionary of Americanisms, but that work doesn't include the details of volume and page number.) Could it be that Farmer mixed up his sources and every subsequent lexicographer simply relied on him without bothering to look at the text itself? That strains credulity.
>  

I imagine that Farmer copied this apparently spurious quotation from Maximiliam Schele de Vere's _Americanisms_ of 1872, which has the quotation and this volume/page reference. Farmer used Schele de Vere regularly.

> Am I missing something obvious?

That historical researchers (of many kinds, not just lexicographers) routinely cite secondary sources without going back to the original? Unfortunately, that shouldn't really "strain credulity" :-(

To its credit, OED acknowledged its use of a secondary source. I expect that when this entry is revised for OED3, they will check the Neal quotation in the original, fail to find it, and revise the entry accordingly, but it would be a generous thing to let OED know that the quotation seems bogus.

So what seems to have happened here is that Schele de Vere got this from somewhere; Farmer copied it from Schele de Vere without acknowledging this (citing it without the biblio reference in _Americanisms_, but with it for the _Dictionary_); the Dictionary of American English cited Farmer & Henley (correctly referring to it as "F. & H.", thus eliminating the chance that it was taken from Farmer's _Americanisms_); OED copied it from the DAE or directly from F & H, changing the reference to simply "Farmer".

For what it's worth, the Dictionary of American English has an 1845 cite for the 'dwelling' sense, and also 1834 and 1837 cites (with 1839 and 1841 examples in HDAS as well) for the sense 'locality; place', so even if the Neal quotation is bogus, I don't think this error represents a radical shift in the history of this term.

Jesse Sheidlower

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