Why wasn't Wordhunt evidence kinky enough for the OED?
Wordhunters rejoiced when they uncovered a 1942 citation of the word kinky in a book about the American underworld. The sentence read “She smelled of kinky lusts and savage dances and phallic wonders and primitive art”. Surely this was an antedating of the term kinky in a sexually adventurous sense? Apparently not….
Peter Gilliver, OED Associate Editor: There's no question that a sentence about "kinky lusts" is referring to rather way-out sexual predilections. But there are two different senses of kinky that "fit" the context: one meaning more generally "queer, eccentric", and the other - the one we asked Wordhunters to help with - meaning specifically "sexually perverted". In fact the more general sense seems now to be rather less common - kinky now more usually has the specific meaning. But when we have a sentence in which kinky is combined with another word ("lusts") which is itself sexual, we can't be sure that kinky carries the specific sexual meaning. The meaning of the sentence would be much the same if we substituted another word meaning simply "eccentric": for example, "way-out lusts". Therefore the sentence is perfectly plausible as an example of the older, more general meaning; and so we can't say definitely that it's an example of the more recent, specific meaning - certainly not definitely enough to use it as an antedating.
How do the OED deal with internet citations?
The internet can provide rich Wordhunting territory as the findings on the term pole dance showed. But can citing internet sources give the OED a headache?
John Simpson, OED Chief Editor: Two or three years ago we changed our policy so that we now accept quotations into the OED which are only found on the Internet. This was a big decision, which we didn’t take lightly. But we were finding new terms which appeared on the Internet before we discovered evidence for them in the traditional sources. Similarly, we discovered recent uses of words which, according to our rules, we would have had to label as ‘obsolete’, or no longer in use, which were still attested online.
There were all sorts of issues with which we had to grapple, and there isn’t space to go into them all here. Suffice to say that we took a fairly conservative stance. We don’t cite from the Internet if there is an acceptable traditional alternative; we prefer ‘archived’ online sources; we retain a printed copy of an online reference in the dictionary’s files and (for contemporary material) cite only from the date we examined the data, not the date from which it claims to originate.
Other online sources are easier to handle: many are online representations of printed, published texts – which we can then recheck in hard copy. Google Groups is another source which contains a datable archive. Each type of source is carefully considered, and cited in the way we deem most appropriate.
The Wordhunter who found pole-dancing (in fact the present participle form of the verb to pole-dance) on a datable Usenet group discussion provided the earliest evidence we have seen for the verb. Maybe it’s not surprising that the term hadn’t cropped up around the same time in more traditional sources – or maybe it had, and we’d overlooked them. Whatever the case, the example was securely datable and good evidence for us that the term existed earlier than we had previously been able to demonstrate.
It’s sometimes said that there is so much lexical material on the Internet that the OED should really be many times bigger than it already is. Everybody’s interest or fetish is amply documented on the Internet. But we’re not finding we need to prepare entries for a mass of new terms discovered in this way. Once we apply our normal rules relating to extent of usage, the vast majority fails the selection criteria - or they’re already in the OED!