Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty.
And today I am here with Ben Zimmer linguist lexicographer, crossword puzzle writer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal and more.
Ben, you do a lot of things.
Welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Thanks.
Glad to be back.
Always a pleasure.
Yeah.
So it turns out, one of the many things you're known for is antedating words, finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries.
And after I had a show about the word scalawag recently, you pointed me to an antedating you'd done on it.
And it's a great story.
Yeah, I loved hearing you talk about the word scalawag.
It's a great word.
And you talked about it, you know, to commemorate Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Although, as you pointed out, it's not actually like a word that comes from pirates.
People associate it with that because of movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, but we call people scalawags not, for you know, the history is completely different than you might expect, right?
And you gave some of that history.
But as it turns out, I was able to present some interesting work that has been done to find earlier examples.
So that's what's called antedating.
Let's say you look in the Oxford English Dictionary and you see, oh, this word dates from...
1850, and then you can find it earlier, 10 years, 20 years or sometimes antedatings can be like 100 years before, if you're really lucky in terms of finding something that no one else has found.
And so, with the word Scalabag, it was fascinating because you know the OED had had, you know, examples going back to the mid 19th century.
There was a fellow who was doing some genealogical research on his family and started poking around in newspaper databases.
And he was a young guy but he was trying to figure out looking for family names in newspapers in upstate New York.
And so he was looking for a particular name, and he found it in newspapers in Batavia, New York, a town that's sort of halfway between Rochester and Buffalo.
And he found his ancestor's name kind of ignominiously listed among people who had kind of skipped out on their debt, And these people, including his ancestor, were labeled Scalawags.
And it had a kind of an interesting spelling.
I think it was like S-K-A-L-L-E-W-A-G-G.
That's the thing with the word like scalawag is it could be spelled lots of different ways.
Right.
And pronounced slightly differently.
And, you know, the vowels might change a little bit as well.
And so he was like well, why is my ancestor being called a scalawag?
And checked the Oxford English Dictionary.
And so these examples were coming from the 1830s, but the OED didn't sort of pick up the story of the word until about 10, 20 years later.
And so he started seeking out experts who could say did I really just find like the earliest example of this word about my ancestor?
And it turns out he did.
Amazing.
Yeah, he had actually checked in with a mailing list that I'm active on from the American Dialect Society.
And so there's a list, serve a mailing list, where a lot of us who are really into trying to antedate words hang out and share our discoveries.
And so he kind of realized, oh, this is where I should go to ask the experts.
And yeah, I mean, he was absolutely right.
And, you know, a word like scalawag might be difficult to find.
Let's say you know you want to find the earliest example because it has so many spelling variations you wouldn't even know what to be looking for.
How would you know to look for S-K-A-L-L-E-W-A-G-G, for instance?
Yeah.
And so even if you were trying to do this kind of targeted searching, it would be very difficult.
So just fortuitously, he had found this early example.
And that I ended up writing a column about this for the Boston Globe at the time.
It was this interesting window into the history of upstate New York because there was a guy who claimed to have coined the word.
He was of Scottish heritage, which makes sense because the word does seem to have Scottish roots.
But he was the one to start calling people Scalawags, and not just these people running out on their debts, but his political opponents in the different political parties that were there at the time.
I mean so sometimes just like a single discovery like that can unlock a rich cultural history that was just sort of there waiting to be discovered in the archives.
Yeah.
And I love the story.
He was sued for calling someone a Scalawag, right?
Yeah, there was some sort of defamation case.
And then I think he had to sort of justify like why he was calling people scalawags.
And and so but but that really seems to be ground zero for the use of the word.
And then it's spread out.
You know, originally it was just a regionalism, I guess, in upstate New York.
By the time of the Civil War.
You know it was taking on other meanings, as you discussed when you talked about it.
But before all of that, there was, you know, there was something going on.
And it's only by kind of digging into digitized databases of newspapers are we able to find that story that has just been sort of untold all this time.
Yeah, and I love that the genealogist with the sharp eye noticed the date difference in the dictionary.
Not everyone would even notice that and then go hunting for it.
So wonderful.
You've told me that you're most famous for your antedating of the word Ms., Right.
You know, in the, in the antedating game there's, there's some of us who've been doing this for a while and we're always trying to one up each other.
But it's, it's a good natured competition, because often you have to kind of build on other people's discoveries and then and then take it a little further, take it a little further.
And Ms is one of those examples where I was able to sort of pinpoint the original suggestion for Ms as a title that would be used for women regardless of marital status.
And it was something that again, if you had checked the OED for a very long time, it would give an example from the 1940s.
There was kind of a one from the 1930s that was kind of perhaps not quite accurate.
The same thing.
And so.
But then it was talked about even in the 1930s and 40s as something that had already been suggested.
But this is the type of thing that's really hard to search for if you're trying to do this antedating.
Is that because it's so short?
Yes, that's a big problem.
You're going to get lots of noise, let's say, and not much signal.
You're going to get a lot of sort of false positives that you have to weed through.
And it's very difficult to find what you're actually looking for amidst all of the stuff that happens to match on those two letters.
And so I started thinking about how one could search for this thing.
And I had an insight about.
Well, how would this term be discussed when it first came up and first proposed?
And surely people would be talking about how it was pronounced because it's this unusual thing.
And even when, in the sort of the you know, the women's liberation movement and the sort of feminist wave of the late 60s, early 70s, And Ms became a popular term of address, that was still being discussed.
You know, how do you pronounce this thing?
And people say, well, it's Ms.
So the trick that I found for kind of like unlocking the history was to search on ways that people might have been talking about the pronunciation.
So I looked for not just MS, but looking for that in conjunction with something like MIZ or MIZZ.
And I got kind of lucky with that, because then that turned up articles that were in the newspaper databases going back to the very early 20th century, 1901 in fact.
And there were.
There were newspapers who were saying yes, the Springfield Republican has suggested that we use this term.
But how do we pronounce it?
Is it pronounced like Ms.?
?
And then so that was the first step.
And then it required figuring out the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican.
Their archives were not yet online yet.
They at the time that I was doing this, looking around for it, it was still microfilm.
Yeah.
So I actually did try to look in microfilm for a while before giving up.
Fortunately, like a year later, I think, the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts did digitize their archive and made it searchable.
And so I was finally able to find it, the original proposal that was made in the pages of the Springfield Republican in 1901.
So that one actually took a few years.
And again, I was sort of kind of building off of other people's discoveries.
So, for instance, Fred Shapiro.
He's a law librarian at Yale Law School and also the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.
And he was making discoveries too, and so we were kind of feeding off each other.
But I was the one to actually find the original, so I can be proud of that.
That's sort of a feather in my cap.
You know, it's so fabulous that so many things are digitized now and they're online.
I was noticing when you've posted about these.
You have screenshots of the old newspapers and things like that.
And they look like they're kind of hard to read sometimes, like the text.
Text isn't super clear.
I mean, is that a challenge sometimes when you're trying to do searches too?
For sure.
Yeah.
You know, it's really been over the past 20 years or so that this kind of searching has even been possible thanks to This kind of digitization.
That's happened with newspapers magazines books, for instance, Google Books.
That's only been around for about 20 years or so.
And so it was around that time I first got intrigued about.
Well, now that we have all of this great new archival, you know, all these records of books and magazines and newspapers and so forth, what can we do with it?
And so it was an exciting time for me, because you could make all these discoveries that hadn't been found before.
But you are kind of dependent on how good those scans are.
And anybody who's sort of looked through scanned documents, whether it's newspapers or whatever you know it can be variable.
So sometimes it's from a transfer that's been made from microfilm.
But Google Books, they're taking photographs of the pages, and so it's pretty high quality.
But very often for newspaper databases...
It's like whatever got microfilmed, whatever quality that was.
And then it goes through something called OCR optical character recognition where it becomes machine readable and searchable and text that you can actually search online.
And sometimes it's good, sometimes not so good.
And sometimes the thing that you're looking for you may be able to search of, like pinpoint it, but to like maybe a date range, like I know.
I know it's here somewhere but I can't find it with a search and then you have to kind of manually go through pages And you know it's still better than going through microfilm, but you still very often will need to sort of like it's probably in this period, in this week of this paper.
I'm just going to have to like keep looking through all the pages until I find it.
Yeah, because like someone mentioned it somewhere else, that they'd read it in the paper, or something like that.
Wow, that's a lot of work.
Sometimes you just find it, boom, it's there within seconds.
But other times it takes a lot more work to find something.
Yeah.
Well, another one you antedated that, you know, I was surprised.
So jazz, the word jazz, like the music, I had no idea it had an origin in baseball.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I can't claim credit for that one, but I've worked with sort of the folks who have made the big discoveries in that.
Yeah, jazz is a fascinating one because... really, I mean, it's such an important word.
In fact the American Dialect Society, when they picked their word of the century for the 20th century, jazz was the winner.
And so the early history has always been kind of intriguing and mystifying because it just starts showing up when jazz becomes the rage in sort of the The, you know, circa 1960, 1917 is when you start getting like the original Dixieland jazz band and things like that.
And Dixieland, I mean, everybody just assumes it comes from New Orleans.
And yes, the music has its roots in New Orleans.
But as far as we can tell, the word doesn't come from New Orleans.
The word only starts getting applied to the music, as far as we know, when it makes its way up to Chicago.
And we have newspaper articles from Chicago in 1915 talking about this new musical form called Jazz.
And of course, it had different spellings.
It could be J-A-Z-Z J-A-Z J-A-S-S, J-A-S and so forth, before it sort of got fixed in its spelling.
But what various researchers have pieced together is that just a few years before that, in 1912, this same word was being used on the West Coast in baseball circles.
There was a pitcher who pitched in the Pacific League and this is before there were any major league teams out on the West Coast who had a curveball that moved in a funny way.
And they started calling that sort of the jazz curve.
And then after that, we have some records from the Bay Area.
In San Francisco, there was a team called the San Francisco Seals.
And there's various usage at that point where they're talking about jazz as like vim or vigor or pep, like give it some of the old jazz.
And that seemed to be related to like the training camp where the San Francisco Seals practiced, you know, before the season started and there was a band there.
And one of the band members ended up going to Chicago and started playing there.
And this guy always claimed that I'm the one who came up with the word jazz.
And he may have sort of brought it with him from San Francisco to Chicago.
And then this music that was really coming from the South, from New Orleans, ends up getting that label.
But it really requires this complicated tale of three cities, as I call it, New Orleans, Chicago and San Francisco for it to all come together as jazz.
Yeah.
And it was also it was spelled differently.
It was spelled with an S sometimes.
I mean, like, did that make it harder to search for?
Or do you kind of just know to look for the different spellings?
Because that's what you do.
Yeah, no, you have to look for all of the spelling variants.
Some people will say, oh, it started as J-A-S-S because the original Dixieland jazz band originally spelled it that way and then changed it to ZZ.
But it turns out, you know, in 1915 in Chicago they were already using that J-A-Z-Z spelling and it appeared in the Chicago Tribune that way.
But for a while it was just one of several possible ways of spelling it before it became the conventional spelling.
Interesting.
And then New Orleans, I think of jazz when I think of New Orleans.
And you've written about why it's called the Big Easy.
Yeah, no, that's another fascinating one that we're still making discoveries about today.
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 the label for New Orleans that people were like.
It was very hard to tell exactly how how far back it went.
And so there was one researcher named Barry Poppock who's done a lot of research on a lot of these terms, is one of the sort of the foremost people for figuring these things out.
Because 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 digging and seeing what he can find.
And so Barry Poppock 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 the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.
And 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 want to get out so that they can go to the Big Easy, meaning New Orleans.
Yeah.
And so that was way earlier than anyone had found previously for that phrase referring to, referring to New Orleans.
It would it would eventually get sort of more famous, you might remember.
In the 1980s, there was a movie called The Big Easy in 1986 with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin.
And so things like that 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're able to sort of fill out this history about how it first got used.
And otherwise we wouldn't have known because it wasn't showing up in just sort of more mainstream sources newspapers and so forth.
Yeah.
No, I was actually just reminded this morning that you can get free access to 100 articles at JSTOR by creating a just creating an account.
Do you know if you can get to the databases with that kind of that kind of account?
If I'm not mistaken, I think JSTOR has made this particular database sort of open access for everyone.
So I think you don't even need a subscription at all to look at that.
So, yeah, it's worth checking out.
Yeah, oh my gosh.
There are all these hidden databases full of fascinating information that people like you know about.
Yeah, sometimes it's just a matter of where you look, because you know could just be something like newspaperscom.
That's a database that people are familiar with.
It is a, you know, a subscription service, but it has a vast variety of newspapers from you know American history and also some other countries.
And sometimes that's like one-stop shopping.
It's like, is it in newspapers.com?
Oh, there it is.
Other times you have to go further afield and find it in these various other archives and databases.
Yeah.
Well, the last one we'll talk about in the main segment.
You also have said that you are a connoisseur of long words.
And the story of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is really fun and interesting too.
Yeah, that is definitely a great one.
So yeah, I've always been interested in, you know, the words that people consider the longest.
And so, whether it's anti-disestablishmentarianism or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and typically people talk about them just as a long word, and people know the super word I won't keep saying it from Mary Poppins.
And that was 1964.
And everybody sort of learned it from there.
And the songwriters for that film and other sort of Disney musicals were the Sherman brothers, Robert and Richard Sherman.
And so I had seen, when Robert Sherman passed away this was back in 2012 that in the obituary they often said he and his brother came up with this word.
They invented this word.
But then I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary just to be like, oh, that's interesting.
What does the Oxford English Dictionary have?
And they said yes, it appears in Mary Poppins, but there were these earlier songs from the 1940s, from 1949, 1951.
And the titles had slightly different versions of that word.
So it was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
It's spelled slightly differently, but close.
I wanted to know the story after I read that Robert Sherman had passed away.
I was able to get in touch with his brother, his songwriting partner Richard Sherman, who has also since passed away, but I was able to talk to him and get the story.
And he said, well, yeah, we didn't invent that word out of nowhere.
We actually knew it from when we were in summer camp as kids in the Catskills or whatever.
And this is a word that just got used around the campfire as like.
Here's this funny?
It turns out that where it came from became important in a lawsuit, because the songwriters from those earlier songs ended up suing Disney and saying we came up with it.
That's our word.
You can't just use it.
And they took Disney to court.
Disney ended up winning because they kind of bought the story that this was something that had just been percolating around campfires and so forth for quite a while and that nobody really owned it.
And so you couldn't sue Disney and say that's our word.
And so I kind of like learned about this whole legal history back when Mary Poppins came out and Disney got sued.
But the lawsuit said that there was some record of this word being used at Syracuse University in the 1930s.
But then nobody actually said, this is the article where it appeared.
I said, well, here's something I can find.
And so I spent some time trying to figure out.
Like, was it in an undergraduate humor magazine or whatever?
But then I saw that in that court case, when Mary Poppins came out, there were experts from Merriam-Webster who were consulted.
So I asked my colleagues at Merriam Webster hey, you have all of these slips of paper that have been you know, these citation slips that have you've collected over the years.
Could you just look in your files and see what you can find?
And it turns out, buried in their voluminous files was this article from Syracuse University the Daily Orange, their student newspaper from 1931.
And it was by a young woman named Helen Herman who talked about... And she sounds like a hoot.
Yeah, yeah.
No again, you sort of learn about these characters when you dig them up.
You know from the archives, like that.
And yeah, she seems like she's a lot of fun.
And she wrote this very funny... piece about this word that she wanted everyone to use.
And she claimed to have invented it, but I don't think she invented it either.
Again, I think there was sort of a penchant for long words that you sort of could make up in late 19th, early 20th century, when it was popular to share these words.
So I don't think we can pinpoint exactly who is the one person.
I don't think it was Helen Herman necessarily.
But you know that that was this kind of very circuitous route to eventually, you know, find this early usage which which can now be, you know, enshrined as the earliest known example of the word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll put a link to her column in the show notes because it really is a lot of fun.
Her bragging claim that she invented this word and where it came from and what it means and everything.
You know, one thing that I've been thinking about as you've been talking is like we have all these instances where the word is slightly different.
It's spelled slightly differently here, used a little differently there.
How do lexicographers decide when a usage is a separate word or like a variant spelling of the same word?
That's a great question.
And 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 both spelling and pronunciation may be variable for a while.
And we've talked about some examples like that, whether it's jazz or scalawag.
I noticed I was looking like 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 about.
And so how did they decide that that was the primary spelling?
Like if I was to spell it, I would probably do it S-E-A-L-A-W-A-G.
Yeah.
So even now, you know, there can be competing versions of the same word.
And that's especially true for slang terms and 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 people being like oh, I'm going to spell it this way, I'm going to spell it that way.
Or like words that are like onomatopoeia.
Those are famously hard to track because they're.
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 well, 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.
Yeah, thanks.
Well, this is so fun.
And in the bonus segment we're going to talk about some of the other amazing sources that Ben uses.
That I guarantee you will not guess.
And we're going to talk about Hella and Words Coined by Bill Murray.
It's going to be great.
So if you're a Grammarpalooza supporter, look for that in your feed or in your text messages.
Ben, thank you so much for being here and telling us these amazing stories.
Where can people find you?
Well, you can.
You can find me on the, on the socials, and you know Blue Sky and Facebook and Ben Zimmer dot com as well.
And you can also find crosswords by me these days.
If you, if you look at Slate, where I'm a regular, or other crossword outlets, you might find my byline as well.
Yeah, I've been enjoying your crossword puzzles lately.
Maybe a little too much.
Well, thank you again for being here.
For everyone else, that's all.
Thanks for listening.
