[Ads-l] Digs: mystery citation?

[George Thompson]

A search of Trove, the database of Australian newspapers and other
publications, shows four and a half million matches -- because the database
routinely translates what (seems to it to be) a participle into all other
forms, and does not allow either limiting to "diggings" or to
"part-of-speech noun".

So much for Trove as a source for lexicographical research -- though you
will hear of it again in a day or so.

GAT

On Thu, Jul 14, 2022 at 9:05 AM dave at wilton.net <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.
>
> Am I missing something obvious?
>
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-- 
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . .
L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

The Trump of Doom -- also known as The Dunghill Toadstool.  (Here's a
picture of his great-grandfather.)
http://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/artwork/james-gillray/an-excrescence---a-fungus-alias-a-toadstool-upon-a-dunghill/3851

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