SC - OT - Food snobbishness

[upsxdls@Okstate.edu]

H B wrote:
> 
A lot of stuff about the OED I agree with.
 
> And out of curiosity -- what kind of vested interest do you have in
> discrediting the OED?

I wouldn't call a wider understanding of how they work and the fact that
they publish the earliest known usage of a word from the pool of books
they provide their readers and compilers with, for that express purpose,
which occasionally leads to errors, discrediting them.

Without going into more detail than time currently allows, I've been
working with some fifteenth-century English mead recipes, which make
reference to "pomys" as having been referenced in an earlier recipe. The
previous recipes don't refer to apples at all, but _do_ have some things
pressed under weights. My argument is that "pomace" is now a perfectly
good English usage denoting anything that has been drained of its fluids
in a press, be it olives, apples, grapes, whatever. (There seems to be
no question that the modern word "pomace" is derived from the apples
left in a cider press.) I feel that the sequence of recipes makes good
sense as it is, and there's no need to wonder what happened to the
obviously missing fragment of the recipe that refers to apples, and if
there had been any intent to include them, the author would have said,
"Put some apples in there."

What he (?) says is to press some honeycombs, then take the pomace
(except he spells it pomys), and boil it to get the last of the honey
from it. (The author may say to press it again, I don't recall.)

Unfortunately, the argument being used against this is that "pomace" is
listed in the OED with its first usage as the seventeenth or eighteenth
century, therefore the recipe must be referring, literally, to apples.  
  

As regards the question of the Princeton online OED, I, personally, have
no problem with them (at least not on moral grounds) limiting access to
their services to those who've paid for them. The situation as it
existed previously was that the site traffic / server was so crowded
that there was no guarantee anyone could use it effectively, and it was
unfair to Princeton's paid students that they should both pay _and_ be
denied the service for which they paid. If someone decided to sit in on
a class without paying for it, and students who did pay for the class
couldn't get into the room, and, let's say, couldn't graduate because
all the final exam papers had been given out to gate-crasher students,
shouldn't they expect to be a bit teed off?

Now, it would be marvelous if there were enough online OED sites for
everyone to use whenever they want to (and I very much doubt if the
publication of a CD-ROM will much affect this _or_ the price of the
dictionary), but seeing that there is such universal access is not the
responsibility of Princeton University.

Now, OTOH, if AOL wanted to offer such access to their users, it might
make a great deal of sense... ;  ). Still, I don't imagine it would be
open to non-AOL users, although it might finally constitute a reason to
switch if such perqs were offered.
  
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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