Who researches first public use of a given term?

[samclem]

@Exapno_Mapcase

Both samclem and poster Tammi Terrell are known experts who get cited in books and articles.

I want to make sure to acknowledge them even though sam’s being modest. They do a lot of grinding, boring work to get their few nuggets of gold.

You should also acknowledge jbaker, who’s more of a professional than I. He posted about the ADS in post #7 above.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@samclem

You should also acknowledge jbaker, who’s more of a professional than I. He posted about the ADS in post #7 above.

I noticed that but I wasn’t familiar enough to make the claim. Please consider it made now, jbaker.

[brujaja]

@Exapno_Mapcase

Both samclem and poster Tammi Terrell are known experts who get cited in books and articles.

I want to make sure to acknowledge them even though sam’s being modest. They do a lot of grinding, boring work to get their few nuggets of gold.

To see just how hard this is, look at the ngrams page for meth. Hits all the way back to 1800! But if you check them, they all seem to be abbreviations for Methodist or Methods, or perhaps meth-anol separated by a hyphen to justify the type.

Somebody has to go through all those hundreds of false hits to see if maybe, just maybe, one of them is a true early anomaly popping up. That’s how it’s done. And before Google books and searchable newspaper archives, it was done by reading old things and scanning for individual words. Still is to a degree. Most of the words generated on paper are not yet searchable.

Wow. And may I say again, wow. That is just stupefying.

I love words, and information about words. I love etymologies. (used to love reading William Safire – my favorite piece of his was about backformed words, titled “I’ll Gangle, You Liaise.”) I had no idea that so much of the information I treasure was so hard-won, although of course when you think about it, there’s really no other way.

Thank you all for the very erudite responses; and ** samclem,** Tammi Terrell, and jbaker – thank you for what you do!

[Wendell_Wagner]

Safire was, alas, not quite as good at researching etymologies as you might think if all you’ve read are the collections of his columns. If you’d like to learn just how much work it takes, look at the various threads on the SDMB about the phrase “the whole nine yards,” which is probably the greatest current unsolved mystery in American English etymology. Both Tammi Terrell and samclem have made major contributions to solving that mystery.

[jbaker]

@samclem

You should also acknowledge jbaker, who’s more of a professional than I. He posted about the ADS in post #7 above.

Thanks, samclem, although I’m unquestionably an amateur. And I should have mentioned Tammi Terrell too. In my defense, I know her instead by a different name.

[jbaker]

@UDS

Well, for what it’s worth the Oxford English Dictionary’s first cite for “meth” as an abbreviation of methamphetamine (as opposed to an abbreviation of methylated spirits) is from the Washington Post on 21 August 1966. Then there’s a cite from the Saturday Evening Post from 1967. The first British cite is the Guardian in 1968.

The first cite for “speed” (in the sense of “n amphetamine drug, esp. methamphetamine, freq. taken intravenously”) is from the US in September 1967. There’s a UK cite from November 1967.

So the two terms are more or less equally old, so far as this evidence goes. The OED gives no information on the relative popularity of each, or on changes in popularity over time. Strictly speaking they are not synonyms; meth is not speed, but a kind of speed, and obviously if meth comes to supplant speed in public discourse this might reflect meth acquiring a dominant position over other amphetamines in the marketplace.

Actually, the two terms are exactly the same age, so far as the known written evidence is concerned. The earliest known use of “meth” to mean methamphetamine is in two articles by Nicholas von Hoffman in the Washington Post on August 21, 1966. One of those articles also uses the term Speed, which it capitalizes. Speed here is used to mean specifically methamphetamine, which it refers to as methedrine.

The article referring to “Speed” is not in the OED. I’ll post this to ADS-L, which the OED monitors.

It may be true that “speed” was more popular was more popular in the 1960s and 1970s, while people refer primarily to “meth” today. It’s impractical to check this with a corpus search, because “speed” usually means velocity, while “meth” most often is an artifact of meth-od or Meth-odist.

[jbaker]

@brujaja

P.S.: ** American Dialect Society members:** I am fascinated. I would love to know more about this process. Say you wanted to find out when “gnarly” first was used in a grunge context. Would you go first to the OED, then maybe look to see who came first, Pearl Jam or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, stuff like that?

On many, many occasions I have read an article of some kind which contained a sentence like,** “The first documented use of the term X to denote Y was in 1862, in a letter to the editor etc. etc.”** I never really thought about where such items come from, and who does the research, and where that knowledge is collected.

But now that I am thinking about it, I’m very glad there are people dedicated to that sort of inquiry.

ADS-L is publicly joinable, see ADS-L: email discussion list – American Dialect Society. You can view and search it without joining, see http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?S2=ads-l&q=&s=&f=&a=&b=.

When you see in an article, “The first documented use of the term X was in Y,” almost certainly the writer has just looked at the OED and is referring to the first quotation listed there. In many cases the term will have been antedated since the OED entry, which may be decades old.

The use of “speed” to mean amphetamines is such an example. As I mentioned in my other posting, I found an earlier use of the term. I’ll post that to ADS-L. Other researchers will probably check to see if they can find anything earlier, in which case there will be follow-up posts.

For “gnarly” I didn’t see anything earlier than what is already in the OED. All uses of “gnarly” derive ultimately from “gnarled,” “Of a tree: Covered with protuberances; distorted, twisted; rugged, knotted.” Modern slang uses derive from surfing, which used “gnarly” to mean “Dangerous, challenging.” The earliest recorded example is from 1977. Later uses diverge into “Awful, unpleasant, unattractive” and “Excellent, cool, attractive,” with the latter traced back to 1982. This is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles use. In the surfing context, you can see how “dangerous, challenging” could give rise to both senses.

For the musical use of “gnarly,” meaning “harsh, grating,” the OED coverage begins in 1986, which predates Pearl Jam. I suspect that this use derives more directly from the “gnarled” meaning, but it could be that it is taken from the surfer slang.

[janeslogin]

The best forum that I know of for discussion is Wordorigins.org Discussion Forums

[jbaker]

@janeslogin

The best forum that I know of for discussion is Wordorigins.org Discussion Forums

Wordorigins.org is run by Dave Wilton, who is a regular contributor to ADS-L. Another source is World Wide Words, run by Michael Quinion, also an ADS-L participant.

[jbaker]

Another American Dialect Society member, Garson O’Toole, reports that “speed” was used in an Associated Press article on June 5, 1966, as a “hippie term” for amphetamines. So the evidence now indicates that “speed” may be slightly older than “meth” after all, although of course that two-month difference is insignificant.