Mind your language | 4 December 2010

I’ve been having as much fun as Citizen Kane must have had on his first outing with Rosebud, for the Oxford English Dictionary has this week fitted a powerful engine of analysis into its online version.

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Ian Williams

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I’ve been having as much fun as Citizen Kane must have had on his first outing with Rosebud, for the Oxford English Dictionary has this week fitted a powerful engine of analysis into its online version. One of the things it does is to tell you where in print the first citation of various words comes from.

The Spectator boasts, if it ever boasts, 140 words first found in its pages, and another 3,469 quotations used by the OED to illustrate meanings. We already knew about agnostic, because R.H. Hutton (proprietor and co-editor of The Spectator from 1861 to 1897) later explained that the word was coined in 1869 by T.H. Huxley one evening in his hearing. Although Hutton left it until January 1870 to write about the concept in The Spectator, no one else put agnostic into print before him. To this we can now, with a click of a search engine, add alarmism (1862), atrabiliousness (with reference to Carlyle, in 1882); beerishly (1865) and bonelessness (1885); consensus (1854) in its physiological meaning, which predates ‘agreement in opinion’ (1861); hinterland (1890) and train-spotter (1958). Pseud, from 1962, apparently predated Private Eye’s use of the term.

Paul Jennings launched resistentialism here in 1948, and, derived from Stephen Potter, upmanship appeared in 1962. But, among the words first quoted from The Spectator you will not find Establishment, meaning ‘the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’. This was defined by Henry Fairlie in The Spectator for 23 September 1955. The OED nobly concedes that this is ‘the locus classicus for this modern sense though occasional earlier uses are recorded’.