Sorry to appear to doubt you. I almost certainly knew you’d come through. It was more for my future knowledge than dissing you.
Thanks for the cite. I was just too backed up to try to find it on my own.
I went to the archives of the American Dialect Society Mailing List, and it’s discussed there. As a side note, Barbara over at snopes says it didn’t get corrected until about 1959, if I interpolated her article correctly.
Joanne Despres, the current editor of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary(the only one you should own, in addition to the OED) said she checked the in-house volumes, and the mistake was actually caught in 1940—but the correction didn’t make it into print until a 1947 edition. She added this, (used without her permission, but I though you’d find it interesting)…