[Ads-l] Antedating of "Wing-Man"

Ben Zimmer bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jan 1 22:47:51 UTC 2023


Off-list, Fred told me that his latest batch of _Yank_ cites are drawn from:

Henry H. Jenkins, "The Diction of _Yank_: Colloquial Speech of the American
Soldier of World War II as Found in Yank Magazine" (University of Florida
Ph.D. dissertation, 1957)
https://www.proquest.com/docview/301898972

I see that Jenkins defines "wing man" as "The pilot who flies on the wing
of an air formation." The _Yank_ cite that Jenkins gives for that is from
Vol. II, No. 23, p. 6, which he dates as Nov. 26, 1943 (as Fred wrote), but
the cover date for that issue is evidently Nov. 21, 1943. Unfortunately
that issue is missing from the archive here:

https://www.306bg.us/archives/htm/yank.htm

Internet Archive and HathiTrust also have issues of _Yank_, but nothing
from 1943.

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=yank1942

Anyone know of another _Yank_ archive?

--Ben

On Sun, Jan 1, 2023 at 3:19 PM Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> What sense of "wing-man" is this? August 1943 Popular Science has the sense
> of "plane on leader's wing", without the hyphen.
>
> On Sat, Dec 31, 2022, 4:22 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> > wing-man (OED 1946)
> >
> > 1943 Yank 26 Nov. 6  Lt. Milton Roach was my wing man.
> >
> > Fred Shapiro
> >
>

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