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!”

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Edit: Totally missed an 1823 source by Protestant missionary to China Robert Morrison (seemingly nothing inbetween that and 1888).