Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, and today I'm here with Ben Zimmer, linguist, lexicographer, crossword

puzzle writer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and more. Ben, you do a lot of things. Welcome to the Grammar

Girl podcast. Thanks. Glad to be back.

It's always a pleasure. Yeah. So it turns out one of the many things you're known for is

antedating words, finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries. And after I had a

show about the word Scalaug recently, you pointed me to an antedating you done on it, and it's a great

story. Yeah, I loved hearing you talk about the word scallowag. It's a great word, and you talked

about it, you know, to commemorate, talk like a pirate day. Although, as you pointed out, it's not

actually like a word that comes from pirates.

People associate it with that because of movies like Pirates of the Caribbean,

but we call people Scala Waggs not for, you know, the history is completely different than you might expect.

And you gave some of that history, but as it turns out, I was able to present some

interesting work that has been done to find earlier examples. So that's what's called

antedating. Let's say you look in the Oxford English dictionary and you see, oh, this word

dates from 1850. And then you can find it earlier, 10 years, 20 years,

or sometimes antedatings can be like 100 years before if you're really lucky in terms of finding something that no one else has found.

And so with the word Scalabag, it was fascinating because, you know, the OED had, had, you know, examples going back to the mid-19th century.

There was a fellow who was doing some genealogical research on his family and started poking

around in newspaper databases. And he was a, you know, a young guy, but, you know, he was trying but he was trying to figure out looking for family names in newspapers in upstate New York.

And so he was looking for a particular name, and he found it in newspapers in Batavia, New York, a town that's sort of halfway between Rochester and Buffalo.

And he found his ancestor's name kind of ignominiously listed among people who had kind of

skipped out on their debt.

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