Earlier today, I wrote a comment telling someone about the word “purpositive”. It’s a rare, nonstandard variant of “purposive”, which itself is a somewhat uncommon (indirect) analogue to “purposeful”. I linked them to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to support my claim. On a lark, I later decided to see if we had an entry on Wiktionary, and we didn’t; I wanted to make one.
For uncommon (essentially, “non-obvious”) words and meanings, we require at least three attestations; we add these as a “Quotations” dropdown under different senses of the word. I try to pull from high-quality sources across different times and contexts, and so I looked back to the OED. Their earliest attestation was from an 1890 work of Benjamin Kidd, a semi-notable social Darwinist. I don’t have paid access ot the OED which may have the full citation, so I did what sensible people do and found a checklist of every known work published by Kidd. Two listed were from 1890, and while unfortunately it was the second one I checked, I did find it.
Later, though, I decided I wanted to add an entry for “purpositively”, the adverb (we keep separate entries for different forms, even plurals); as it’s such a rare word, I wanted to add quotations even though it’s just a trivial adverb form of its adjective. I got excited because Google Books showed that there was an 1861 usage of “purpositively”, which would totally shatter OED’s attestation; I jumped in, and it seemed weird that it was about beetle insecticides (it did make me happy to see the word “beetle-wafers”). Well…
After a short reassessment of the futility of existence, I decided to see if maybe Newspapers.com had anything. As it turns out, there’s a newspaper article from 15 April 1888 in the Cleveland Plain Dealer quoting a speech that used the word “purpositive”. This is the Wiktionary entry that gives the OED the most pointless one-up imaginable.
In other words: “Fuck you, Oxford! You’re not my dad!”
Edit: Totally missed an 1823 source by Protestant missionary to China Robert Morrison (seemingly nothing inbetween that and 1888).
?? that looks like it’s misinterpreting two word fragments across the two adjacent pages. There’s a page line right down the center of that screenshot.
“…to his great astonishment, he positively observed…” “…and tradesmen who purchase our poison…”
that looks like it’s misinterpreting two word fragments across the two adjacent pages.
Correct! Because “pur-” is at the right side and “positively” is at the left of the next vertical line, Google Books gave up and said: “Fuck it.”
I am still confused because if i read more of the text it does look like left and right are completely different pages. The next vertical line you mention is the previous page.
The word on the left seems like its just “positively” and on the right “purchase” In the sentence “tradesmen who purchase our poison”
This is what the actual page looks like. It’s a reasonably common layout for older publications like this.
Ok thats fairly interesting but the line break does still seem to matter or none of the sentences make any sense.
In case i am just stupid, could you please explain how to read the sentence where the word is used in
If i read it like this then this is what i get, which reads like nonsense,
"It is a strange fact, perhaps; but we do saw cockroaches running along the tester of not know anything, or scarcely anything, as to the bed, but, to his great astonishment, he the kind of people and tradesmen who purpositively observed one of them seize a bug, chase our poison-to speak the truth, we do and he therefore concluded, and not without not like to make too many inquiries of our some show of reason, that the cockroach customers.
But if i read each side on its own i do get 2 very readable sentences.
“Still he pursued his nocturnal investigations, and he not only saw cockroaches running along the tester of the bed, but, to his great astonishment, he positively observed one of them seize a bug, and he therefore concluded, and not without some show of reason, that the cockroach ascended the curtains with this especial object, and that the more odoriferous insect is a favourite food of the major one.”
On the left, and
"It is a strange fact, perhaps; but we do not know anything, or scarcely anything, as to the kind of people and tradesmen who purchase our poison-to speak the truth, we do not like to make too many inquiries of our customers.”
On the right.
That was an example of his initial research failing. I’m not sure what point you’re arguing; op provided that as a failure, not a success, so he already agrees with you…??
Oh that clears it up, i thought op cited this as a proof of the word that they found.
Sorry to op for the confusion.
Wrong sub, friend. Teaching me cool new words is far too interesting.
Very nicely done haha! I for one love the Wiktionary, and referenced it today to confirm that “to auction off” is the generally-accepted phrase, as opposed to “to auction away”.
Thanks! I don’t contribute there nearly as often as Wikipedia, but I do think it’s seriously underappreciated in that very few people seem to know about it. It’s so convenient to just have multiple languages in one place, and I usually find that Wiktionary gives me more and better information than standard dictionaries. (I try to help keep that order when I make new entries.)
What I especially love is that we can do a lot of fun things that regular dictionaries can’t; one of them that I made a while back (based off of a table of chess pieces) is a table of all the signs of the zodiac. Most major languages have one now for each of their zodiac signs – for example, ‘Bélier’, the French of ‘Aries’.
Very cool snd not particularly dull. Thanks for sharing.
Sorry. 😭 19th-century social Darwinist texts, old Cleveland Plain Dealer news stories, beetle insecticide salespeople, and dictionaries seemed like a williwaw of boring.
