Word: earliest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Farmermaid. A spinster, Miss Willson painted in a Greene County, N.Y. farm cabin sometime between 1800 and 1825. The Willson watercolors are among the earliest primitives in the history of U.S. art. Miss Willson shared her farm life with a hardy settler named Miss Brundage. A kind of 19th-Century Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the two women built their own log cabin. Then, while Miss Willson sat down to paint, Miss Brundage tilled the soil. The Willson pictures were sold to farmers and other buyers as far north as Canada, as far south as Mobile. The artist...
Harold Boeschenstein's earliest memories are of paper and ink and the newspaper business. Nowadays he fervently wishes that he could forget all about them...
Bunt Bungled. With the definitions are given the earliest recorded usage, plus examples, sometimes as recent as 1925. Sources have included books, newspapers, magazines, advertising materials, circus posters - but not the sandlots, saloons or ball parks. That the research was some what cloistered is evident when the DAE defines to bunt as "to stop [the ball] with the bat without swinging . . ." or avers that what gets bleached in the bleachers is the bleachers rather than the fans...
Skunk, Squash. The DAE pudding, however, contains many a juicy plum. It shows English being enriched, from the earliest days, by borrowings from the U.S. From the Indians came possum, persimmon, punk, skunk, squash, succotash; from the Dutch, cruller, sawbuck, scow, slaw, snoop, stoop, waffle; from the Spanish, cafeteria, calaboose, lariat, mustang; from the German, cranberry...
...Volume IV the dispute over the origin of Yankee floored the editors. The best they could do was to indicate the word's earliest use (1765) and its range of meanings. Thus, a Yankee is an American to a foreigner, a New Englander to an American, and a Northerner to a Southerner; as a verb the word is obsolete slang meaning "to hornswoggle...