Ben Zimmer on Antedating.

Mignon Fogarty, online as Grammar Girl, interviewed Ben Zimmer for her podcast; I link to the transcript, which is what I require as a text-based person. Fogarty starts out:

So it turns out one of the many things you’re known for is antedating words, finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries. After I had a show about the word “scallywag” recently, you pointed me to an antedating you’d done on it. And it’s a great story.

It is indeed; I posted about it here. She goes on to discuss “Ms.” (LH) and “jazz” (LH); just when I was thinking I’d heard it all before, she got to “the Big Easy,” a nickname for New Orleans:

Ben Zimmer: Today, it’s great how sometimes these are kind of ongoing stories and, like, sometimes what I’m doing in my columns is just trying to capture the research for something like that. As it’s going, you know, as people are trying to piece it together. And so, the Big Easy is one of those as the sort of label for New Orleans that people were like, it was very hard to tell exactly how far back it went. And so, there was one researcher named Barry Popik, who’s done a lot of research on a lot of these terms, is one of the sort of foremost people for figuring these things out. Because he, once he gets on a particular word or phrase, whether it’s Big Apple for New York or Big Easy for New Orleans, he’ll just sort of keep digging and seeing what he can find. And so, Barry Popik had found out that there was a name of a dance hall across the river in Gretna, Louisiana, that was called the Big Easy as early as 1910.

But I mentioned another one of these researchers, Fred Shapiro, who is the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. And he is, he’s always looking to see, well, what new resources are out there that we can look at? And he brought something to our attention that there’s a digital library called JSTOR, and that they added this collection of American prison newspapers. And so, yeah, these are newspapers that were published in prisons for inmates. And this was this whole kind of trove of material that really had never been looked at before in any serious way. And if you look in that database that’s now available on JSTOR to search through, you can find one particular newspaper from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. That penitentiary was sort of known as Angola, and so their newspaper edited by inmates there was called “The Angolite.” And so it turns out, if you look up Big Easy, you will find these references going back to 1957 about the Big Easy, where they’re talking about, oh, they wanna get out so that they can go to the Big Easy, meaning New Orleans.

And so, that was way earlier than anyone had found previously for that phrase referring to New Orleans. It would eventually get sort of more famous. You might remember, in the 1980s, like there was a movie called “The Big Easy” in 1986 with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin. And so, things like that it sort of got more national attention, but that’s a case where it’s like, yeah, I mean, you know, just thanks to this sort of prison newspaper database, we were able to sort of fill out this history about, you know, how it first got used, and otherwise we wouldn’t have known because it wasn’t showing up in just sort of more, you know, mainstream sources, newspapers, and so forth.

She continues with “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (LH), another great excavation, and finishes up with an interesting question:

You know, one thing that I’ve been thinking about as you’ve been talking is, like all, we have all these instances where the word is slightly different. It’s spelled slightly differently here or used a little differently there. How do lexicographers decide when usage is a separate word, or like a variant spelling of the same word?

Ben Zimmer: That’s a great question, and it’s… Dictionaries try to capture language as it’s kind of bubbling up, but then also how it gets kind of fixed and conventionalized, and that has to do with both spelling and pronunciation may be variable for a while. And we’ve talked about some examples like that, whether it’s jazz or scallywag. I noticed I was looking, like, you know, the OED entry has S-C-A-L-L-Y-W-A-G, and they haven’t updated it yet, and they haven’t included all that new research that I was talking about. And so how did they decide that was the primary spelling? Like if I was to spell it, I would probably do it S-C-A-L-A-W-A-G. So, even now, you know, there can be competing versions of the same word, and that’s especially true for slang terms and, you know, other terms that kind of bubble up from colloquial usage long before they’re written down. So by the time they’re written down, yeah, there could be, you know, people being like, oh, I’m gonna spell it this way, I’m gonna spell it that way.

Or like, words that are like “onomatopoeia,” those are famously hard to track because there again, it’s representing a sound, and there could be lots of different ways to represent that sound, but as long as it’s all kind of clustered around the same semantic basis, semantic foundation, then you can say, yes, these are all variations of the same word. And we’ll put it all in one entry in the dictionary, but we may have to give you a whole bunch of different variants in order for you to say, okay, this is a version of this other thing. And sometimes it’s regional, and there can be other reasons why you get all these different versions of the same word.

I love it when lexicographers talk lexicography.