[Ads-l] Fw: Antedating of "Goof Off"

[Shapiro, Fred]

(What follows may seem like I am annoyed at Jon Lighter, but that is not at all the case, I am just taking this opportunity to explain part of my attitude toward posting antedatings on this list.)

I should of course have checked Jon Lighter's masterwork The Historical Dictionary of American Slang.  I should check every antedating against the OED, HDAS, Green's Dictionary of Slang, Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive, ProQuest, Readex, Gale, GenealogyBank, Chronicling America, Fulton History, British Newspaper Archive, Google Books, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, JSTOR, Elephind, barrypopik.com (and, for older items, EEBO, ECCO, etc.).  But I hope that people on this list realize that I am interested in quantity of antedatings, and also have extremely demanding book projects, a demanding full-time job, and a family.  Therefore, I often will be content to post an antedating without taking the time to attempt to find THE ultimate antedating by checking all the sources I just mentioned.  I do go through the whole list for terms that I view as especially important or especially interesting.

One of the great things about ADS-L is that I can succeed in bringing the ultimate thorough antedating to light by posting any, un-thorough antedating and by doing so motivate one of the great other antedaters on this list (some of whom are much more clever than myself) to do the whole hog of research.  Often that is my hope when I post my "quick and dirty" antedating.  I get a lot of satisfaction if my posting leads someone else to make a great discovery.  For example, I am very happy that my antedating of "science fiction" led Stephen Goranson to find the very important "ultimate" antedating of that term.

Fred Shapiro


________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Sunday, January 1, 2023 9:39 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Antedating of "Goof Off"

HDAS (a resource widely underutilized) has a 1941, from Marion Hargrove's
best-selling _See Here, Private Hargrove!_ (pub. July, 1942).

JL

On Sat, Dec 31, 2022 at 2:40 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> goof off, v. (OED, 1.e., 1952)
>
> 1942 Yank 2 Dec. 11  He goofed off somehow.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
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--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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