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<Proofreader>
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Here's a list of words which all entered the language at roughly the same tme. Can you guess what that era would be?

adviser (military)
atomic bomb
allergy
Alzheimer’s disease
bomber (as a terrorist)
chain store
D-day
family values
grass roots
homosexual
isotope
motorcade
mushroom (cloud)
quantum theory
Red (communist)
sex symbol
white collar

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I'm guessing some time in the early 1920s


It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti
 
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Well, I am going to select "none of the above." Allergy, chain store and D-Day? Couldn't be, unless it's a trick question, which it must be.
 
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I could look it up but I'll go (D-Day notwithstanding) even ealier and go for the 1910s


"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
 
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I'll go even earlier. 1890s.


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Maybe I should have posted a poll
 
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I'd say the first decade of the last century.


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According to Oxford's A Century of New Words, by John Ayton, all of those terms entered the English vocabulary between 1910 - 1920.
 
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Well, those are all impossible, unless of course D-Day is added for a trick question. Allergy, I know, originated in the early 1900s so none of this makes sense to me.
 
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Homosexual is attested in 1892 in the OED but the other ones I looked up are from around 1910-1920, including D-Day.
 
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Then it is a trick question because the normally used D-Day is from 1944. But, then, I suspected that from the beginning.
 
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I don't think it's a trick question at all. D-Day is military code for the day an operation is scheduled to begin. The OED Online's first citation is from 1918: "Field Order No. 8, First Army, A.E.F. 7 Sept., The First Army will attack at H-Hour on D-Day with the object of forcing the evacuation of St. Mihiel salient."

Granted, the best-known D-Day is day of the Allied landing at Normandy, June 6, 1944 (originally scheduled for June 5, but delayed because of bad weather).
 
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Remember the question wasn't "when did they acquire their current common usage" it was "when did they enter the language".


"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
 
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Remember the question wasn't "when did they acquire their current common usage" it was "when did they enter the language".


exactly
 
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That's why it was I trick. Sorry, fellas, but I disagree.

At least, though, I didn't spend a lot of time on it because I figured that from the beginning.
 
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quote:
Originally posted by Kalleh:
Sorry, fellas, but I disagree.


Disagree about what? That is wasn't a trick question? I don't see how the question could be stated any plainer.

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Trick questions can be plain. They just make the answer seem obvious when it isn't. I know. I've developed many questions for students. Eek

For example, "Every patient on chemotherapy loses his hair" (or is nauseated or whatever). It doesn't take long for students to learn that "every," always," and "never" are almost never the correct answer. [Note the addition of "almost"] Certainly most patients lose their hair (at least with certain kinds of chemo), but not every. There are a few exceptional situations, particularly in medicine.
 
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So, you are saying that it was a trick question? What was the trick?


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Ah well, no one agrees with me, so I guess I am wrong.

To me, the trick is that some of the terms, like D-Day, are well-known and easily discernible for when they originated. But, lo and behold, it is a military term to denote the day on which combat is to be initiated. Of course, according to Wikipedia, the best known D-Day is June 6, 1944.

I give up on this one. With all these bright people here arguing against me, you've convinced me that I am wrong. It wasn't a trick question.

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Don't give up so easily, Kalleh. It's pretty much a "trick" question. I'm sure it did not originate with Proof. Where did he come across the list of words?


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I guess it depends on how you define "trick question."

Here's what Adviceopedia says:
quote:
What is a Trick Question?

A trick question can be used in a variety of circumstances. These types of questions are often used as a type of joke or within the context of a game. Sometimes people label certain questions as a trick if the person asking the question poses it with the intention of confusing or shedding a bad light onto the responder.

Common characteristics of these types of questions include:

* Answers which may seem initially obvious, but which aren’t actually the correct answers. For example, the first impulse to answer the question What do you put into a toaster? with toast is incorrect. Bread is put into a toaster, and then develops into toast, so the correct answer is bread. Many people answer with toast because it is the first answer which comes to mind, and it seems too obvious to be wrong.

* The question is designed to confuse people. Ask someone how many months of the year have twenty-eight days, and the most likely answer you will receive is one, referring to the month of February. The true answer to this question, however, is all the months, because each month within the year indeed has twenty-eight days, even though there are more than twenty-eight days in the majority of months.

* The correct answer is a fact. When the actual answer to the trick question is revealed, it shouldn’t be debatable.

The basic anatomy of a trick question is this: The answer is already known by the person asking the question, and it’s supposed to confuse the person being asked.


And here's what Wikipedia says:

quote:
Complex question, trick question, multiple question or plurium interrogationum (Latin, "of many questions") is a question that has a presupposition that is complex.

All I can say to that is, Huh?

But I like what Calvin and Hobbes says.

I didn't consider it a trick question because we were told the words all entered the language at about the same time. The words sounded fairly modern, but I assumed they were older that they appeared. That was the whole purpose of asking the question.

The words were all taken from A Century of New Words, by John Ayto, as Proof said. The book is divided up into decades, the 1900s, 1910s, and so on. His information comes from the OED, and he stresses that these are the first known written uses of the words, but they may have been in use much longer.

Here's what the OED Online says:
quote:
adviser (military) - 1915 (n)

atomic bomb - 1914 (n) 1945 (v)

allergy - 1907 (n)

Alzheimer’s disease - (1911)

bomber (as a terrorist) - 1915, but terrorist or terrorism not specifically mentioned. Terrorist dates from 1795.

chain store - 1910

D-day - 1918

family values - 1916

grass roots -
  • a. The fundamental level; the source or origin.Some of the later examples are influenced by sense 2b.

    1901    R. Kipling Kim xiv. 371   Not till I came to Shamlegh could I meditate upon the Course of Things, or trace the running grass-roots of Evil.

  •  b. Polit. Used spec. to describe the rank-and-file of the electorate or of a political party. Also attrib. orig. U.S.

    1912  McClure's Mag. July 324/1   From the Roosevelt standpoint, especially, it was a campaign from the ‘grass roots up’. The voter was the thing.


homosexual - 1892 (adj) 1912 (n) - Ayto lists homosexual under the decade of the 1910s, apparently because it was first attested as a noun in 1912, but notes that it was attested as an adjective in 1892. Ayto says in both cases the word was translated into English from a German text.

isotope - 1913

motorcade - 1913 (n) 1965 (v)

mushroom (cloud) -
  • 1909 An ascending cloud of smoke and debris characteristically taking the shape of a tall column spreading out into a broad flattish top; esp. such a cloud resulting from a nuclear explosion. Also fig.

    Cent. Dict. Suppl. Suppl. 840/2 (caption) Mushroom-cloud as seen above Mt. Pelée during its eruption in June, 1902.

  • mushroom - 1916  8. A cloud of smoke, fire, etc., which rises in a column and then rolls outwards into a mushroom shape. Cf. mushroom cloud n.

    1916    J. Buchan Greenmantle xxi. 291   There was the dull shock of an explosion and a mushroom of red earth.)



quantum theory - 1911

Red (communist) - 1851 (etymology.com: "Bolshevik" 1909, "radical, communist" 1851; OED says the 1851 meaning of red was "a political radical, as a republican, anarchist, or socialist")

sex symbol - n.  (a) a symbol that represents sex, or (the attributes of) a particular sex (now rare);  (b) a person widely regarded as the epitome of sexual attractiveness and glamour (now the usual sense).

1871    J. H. Jones Kingdom of Heaven 14   It resulted inevitably, therefore, that‥the woman, the *sex-symbol of the spirit, should become the slave of the man, the sex-symbol of the flesh.

a1911    D. G. Phillips Susan Lenox (1917) II. xx. 442   Men‥might regard her as nothing but sex symbol; she regarded herself as an intelligence.

Ayto mentions only the 1911 quote.

white collar -
  • 1919 - a. (As two words.) A white collar regarded as characteristic of a man engaged in non-manual work.)
  • 1930 - b. A person engaged in non-manual work.

Ayto begins the book with these sentences:
quote:
It is 1900. In Britain, Queen Victoria is still on the throne. At the start of the Victorian era, over sixty years before, the railways were a novelty; the only means of taking to the air was the balloon; the voting franchise was still biased towards the landed classes; and the crinoline had not been heard of.

If crinoline had not been heard of by 1900, when did it appear? Ayto never answers this question.

Now, I had never heard of crinoline, so I looked it up. Crinoline was originally a stiff fabric made of horsehair and cotton or linen used to make petticoats, them it was extended to any material used for the purpose, and still later to the petticoat. The earliest citation is from 1829.
 
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he words were all taken from A Century of New Words, by John Ayto, as Proof said.

I have not been following this thread too closely. It was not stated in the opening post, and I skimmed over his answer. From the dates you cite, the list seems to stretch over two decades. I call it a trick question because of the inclusion of atomic bomb and D day which in most everybody's minds are associated with World War II. I knew atomic bomb was earlier. From quantum theory and Alzheimer's disease I assumed the first quarter of the previous decade. But I rapidly lost interest in the pursuit of first citations and posted nothing until coming to Kalleh's post yesterday.


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quote:
According to Oxford's A Century of New Words, by John Ayton, all of those terms entered the English vocabulary between 1910 - 1920.

That's the source, as I mentioned earlier. It was only a "trick" question if you incorrectly thought some words (D-Day, atomic bomb) were only used in the forties, and not earlier. I hadn[t intended it to be a "trick", just informational material about how long words are in our bvocabulary before they become almost universally or commonly used.
 
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Tinman, I'd not heard of Adviceopedia before. Is it a good source? When do you suggest using it? From that discussion of trick question, here is where I felt this question fell:
quote:
The question is designed to confuse people.
And, while we were told the words all entered the language at the same time, I don't always believe what I read.
quote:
The words sounded fairly modern, but I assumed they were older that they appeared. That was the whole purpose of asking the question.
They didn't all sound fairly modern to me. Indeed, I was shocked that "allergy" is as new as it is.
 
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The first time I heard of Adviceopedia is when I read that article. It seems to be modeled after Wikipedia. I haven't found a start-up date for it, but I did find this:
quote:
Adviceopedia.org has the estimated value of $4,027 and ranks # 1,007,221 in the World (Alexa). With the daily ads revenue: $3 and pageviews per day: 147. The website is hosted on server that locates in Seattle WA United States.

I just ran across Scholarpedia.org, which the MIT PressLog (news blog for the MIT Press) describes as a "a peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia."

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quote:
If crinoline had not been heard of by 1900, when did it appear? Ayto never answers this question.

The sentence is rather poorly worded, but he's talking about the start of the Victorian era, not 1900.
quote:
At the start of the Victorian era, over sixty years before [...] the crinoline had not been heard of.
Since the start of the Victorian era was 1837 and the crinoline is first mentioned in 1829 he does seem to be wrong, but not so far wrong. Wink

EDIT: He's not wrong. The crinoline, in the A stiffened petticoat or underskirt made with this material, designed to support the skirts of a woman’s dress; (hence) a rigid petticoat worn for this purpose, lined with, or consisting of, a framework of some other material, as whalebone, steel hoops, etc.; a hoop petticoat sense is first cited in the OED as 1847, ten years after Queen Victoria's accession.

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Yes, I see it now. The first sentence is 1900. The second sentence is 60 years earlier.
 
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I'd think this "Adviceopedia" and "Scholarpedia" would be separate from Wikipedia, right? If so, it's odd that they look so similar to Wikipedia. Are they connected?
 
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quote:
Originally posted by Kalleh:
I'd think this "Adviceopedia" and "Scholarpedia" would be separate from Wikipedia, right? If so, it's odd that they look so similar to Wikipedia. Are they connected?


I doubt it. They're all wikis, and a lot of wikis use the same Mediawiki software which gives them a similar look and feel. "Wiki" is a generic term, but its association with Wikipedia in recent years has become so strong that some people wrongly assume that all wikis are linked to it.
 
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I'd think this "Adviceopedia" and "Scholarpedia" would be separate from Wikipedia, right?

As Guy says, wikis are a kind of software, separate from the content. (Confusing Wikipedia and wikis is like confusing MS Word and word processors, or in pre-computer terms confusing Tom Sawyer and a typewriter.) As Wikipedia is so famous now (going into its 2nd decade), and because it is "free", there are many other -paedias out there hoping to cash in on both its content and its name. You would have to compare an article in Wikipedia and one of the other ones you asked about, and even then who knows. As anybody can edit and change wikis, you don't know when a Wikipedia article got copied.


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Still, I'd think some of the software would be different, though I suppose you are right, Z, that they are trying to "cash in" on the name of Wikipedia. On the other hand, a more innovative person would develop a new look and a new function (i.e. Facebook versus MySpace) and perhaps overshadow Wikipedia.
 
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quote:
Originally posted by Kalleh:
Still, I'd think some of the software would be different


Mediawiki was custom-designed for Wikipedia, but is publicly available and suitable for tailoring to other applications. I suppose a lot of sites use it because it's familiar and easy to use.

quote:
though I suppose you are right, Z, that they are trying to "cash in" on the name of Wikipedia.


To be fair, "-pedia" comes from "encyclopedia", so you'd have a hard time trying to prove that any of these sites were trading on Wikipedia's reputation.

quote:
On the other hand, a more innovative person would develop a new look and a new function (i.e. Facebook versus MySpace) and perhaps overshadow Wikipedia.


Have you seen Citizendium? That was a project set up by a group of people who were dissatisfied with the Wikipedia model and wanted to improve on it. It certainly has a different look and feel to it.
 
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Have you seen Citizendium? That was a project set up by a group of people who were dissatisfied with the Wikipedia model and wanted to improve on it. It certainly has a different look and feel to it.
Yes, it does, and I am on record here for not liking Wikipedia as well as many do. I'll have to keep an eye on it, though I will say the "please donate!" put me off a bit. It took Wikipedia awhile to promote that. I suppose OEDILF will be next.
 
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We here at Wordcraft do have our own wiki, don't forget, at http://wordcraft.wetpaint.com/. It was created a few years ago for items that don't really fit into the context of a forum, but has never really taken off. The software is another variant of the wiki format, and looks fairly different from Mediawiki.


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Our Wiki really wasn't a collaborative project, which is the way Wikis are best used. We are building some modules with 12 different authors at my work, and using the Wiki, with all the reviews that are necessary, is a great way to use it. We really were using Wordcraft's much like a Blog. I know that OEDILF uses one, and I can see where that would be helpful when workshopping limericks.
 
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Our Wiki really wasn't a collaborative project, which is the way Wikis are best used.

It's not so much the collaboration (as many other kinds of online media can be collaborative, e.g., blogs, cf. Language Log), but the type writing. In the case of Wikis, the entries tend to be geared more towards reference material. Blogs tend to be more diary-like.


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Much of my work is done with committees from our membership. We used to send out, in huge notebooks, paper versions of all our documents. When I came to the organization, I began sending out everything electronically. However, working on documents together created problems. Now we do all that work on our Wiki, and while the technology bothers some, it is so much easier to keep track of documents and to make revisions. What a change from sending out out reams of paper to everyone.
 
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