Local Boy Makes Word?

By Ben Yagoda. Idea for a sitcom: The Big Lang. Theory. Premise is that a bunch of language nerds sit around and talk about their observations, obsessions, and pet peeves. Let’s say their names are Geoffrey, Lucy, Allan, and Ben, and that they’ve got some wacky neighbors, Bill, Anne, Ilan, and Rose. For the pilot episode,  one of the gang, scouring the databases and corpora, thinks she has found a use of a word published prior to the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. But it turns out to come from a book that Google Books gave an incorrect date to. Hilarity ensues. More...