Date:  Sun, 19 Oct 1997 10:49:54 -0400
From:  Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALE.EDU>
Subject: Re: Etymology of _Hoosier_

Dennis,

Thanks for your interesting message. My comments referred to historical
truth rather than "psycholinguistic, morphological" truth.

I fear that, as we move into the Age of the Internet, and fewer and fewer
people have any understanding of the notion of matters of history and
etymology being provable by documented primary sources, the historical
truths of etymology will become more and more buried beneath the mounds of
popular conjecture. My sister-in-law read in a computer text that the
term _bug_ 'hardware or software defect' originated because Grace Murray
Hopper found a moth in an early computer. No amount of my explaining that
Thomas Edison used essentially the same term in the 1800s could shake her
conviction that this story was correct. Current trends in the
preservation (i.e., non-preservation) and dissemination of information
will only increase the difficulty of such discussions.


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 Fred R. Shapiro               Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
 Associate Librarian for Public Services   TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research      ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
 Yale Law School               Oxford University Press, 1997
 e-mail: fred.shapiro[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]yale.edu        ISBN 0-19-509547-2
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