[Ads-l] Antedating of ""Bae"

[Shapiro, Fred]

This is an interesting one.  My first reaction was that Joanne's 1983 citation is so much earlier than other evidence that it must be an accidental typo for "babe."  Then I started searching Newspapers.com and focusing on Valentine's Day newspaper messages.  I see that there are other uses of "my bae" in Valentine's Day messages over the years.  The earliest I have seen so far is the following:

1981 Memphis-Scimitar 14 Feb. 21/1 (Newspapers.com)  TO MY BAE. FROM YOUR BAE.

The frequency of such uses is greater than zero, but is really quite low when one realizes that Newspapers.com is searching billions of Valentine's Day messages.  I'm not sure about an accidental-typo theory when I see that the 1981 instance repeats BAE.  Maybe the Sunshine person in Joanne's 1983 cite, who used "MY BAE" on other Valentines Days in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was just a really bad speller.

Fred Shapiro


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