Word: earliest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other hand, every new term, however inelegant, is given the treatment that long ago distinguished the OED from all competitors. This dictionary does not merely give etymologies, pronunciations and definitions; it also provides a word's earliest known appearance in print and uses quotations to illustrate the context in which the word has been used and all shifts of meaning to which it has been subjected. Hence AIDS (another lamentable addition to the lexicon) is defined and then traced back to its presumptive print debut, in the Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report of Sept...
...autobiography Self-Consciousness, Updike recounts his earliest memory of stuttering, when a bully nicknamed him "Ostrich." "[It was] a nickname I did not think I deserved," Updike writes, "and a fear of being misunderstood or mistaken for somebody else has accompanied the impdiment ever since...
...History and Literature concentrators whose department had the earliest thesis deadline of the College, five o'clock yesterday...
Many of the women have a lifetime of experience to overcome. Rodgers' earliest childhood memory was watching her heroin-addict mother stick a needle in her arm. Until recently, Rodgers was lost in a haze of cocaine smoke and subsisted on leftovers pilfered from a fast-food restaurant. Now she sits in the Mandela House kitchen, which is rich with the smell of baking meat loaf...
...dogs, famous Jews of the 20th century and Mercedes; or that his actual influence on younger artists varied from liberating to moderately disastrous. The show fills in details in one's knowledge of Warhol's work -- for instance, how his fascination with the repeated image was there from his earliest days as an illustrator -- but does not change one's sense of its basic priorities...