{"id":110,"date":"2003-08-18T01:55:45","date_gmt":"2003-08-18T05:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/08\/18\/bailey\/"},"modified":"2003-08-18T01:55:45","modified_gmt":"2003-08-18T05:55:45","slug":"bailey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/08\/18\/bailey\/","title":{"rendered":"Bailey!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a114'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve answered the pressing question: did the <u>Lexicon Balatronicum<\/u> steal its etymology of &#8220;dildo&#8221; from Bailey?  The answer is yes.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a wonderful, amazing <a href=\"http:\/\/sallie.rutgers.edu\/~triggs\/SPECTATOR\/bailey\/a-z.html\">etext <\/a> of Nathaniel Bailey&#8217;s <u>Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English Language<\/u>.  It consists of scans of the pages, served out with a system called &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/djvuzone.org\/wid\/index.html\">djvu<\/a>&#8220;.  This requires a plugin to work (and will make Mozilla fail spectacularly &mdash; don&#8217;t do that), but it&#8217;s well worth it.<\/p>\n<p>There is only one tiny problem, which is that the online edition is from 1772, after a couple other editors had mucked with the book (Bailey died in 1742).  Johnson&#8217;s Dictionary, which everyone goes on about being better than Bailey, was published in 1755.  People claim that Bailey&#8217;s has the juicy words, including our versions of &#8220;cunnus&#8221; and &#8220;futuo&#8221;.  But this one doesn&#8217;t have them!  I&#8217;m afraid the evil influence of Johnson, who was too much of a tight-ass to even let &#8220;dildo&#8221; into his, scared the later editors into vitiating this Bailey.<\/p>\n<p>But, really, no biggie.  Non-obscene words can be fun to look up too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve answered the pressing question: did the Lexicon Balatronicum steal its etymology of &#8220;dildo&#8221; from Bailey? The answer is yes. There&#8217;s a wonderful, amazing etext of Nathaniel Bailey&#8217;s Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. It consists of scans of the pages, served out with a system called &#8220;djvu&#8220;. This requires a plugin to work [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}