Xenolinguistics

Last year, I mentioned the OED looking for citations for sfnal words. The project has a new website. But, c’mon! Nancy Kress’ Probability Moon in 2000 as first citation for xenolinguist? According to the ISFDB, Sheila Finch’s Xenolinguist Guild stories date to 1989. Sheri Tepper’s Raising the Stones was 1990. And I’ll be very surprised if those are particularly early. (And if I had original editions on me, I’d do something useful and submit citations. I do have a ‘97 reprint of a ‘96 Finch story, though…) Despite my expectation that 1942 should be easy to beat for extraterrestrial as a noun, it looks like so far they’ve only pushed it back to 1941.

22:59:58 March 17, 2005, Thursday (PST) Source: MemeMachineGo!

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