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OED Science Fiction Database Updated
solferino writes "The Oxford English dictionary commenced a project back in 2001 (Slashdot report) to solicit reader citations of the earliest uses of science fiction words. The most recent OED newsletter covers the progress of the project, which has its own site hosted on a FreeBSD box running a MySQL database engine. An interesting graph on the site shows date of word origin by decade. Surprisingly recent words featured on the site are /avatar/ (1990 - in the VR sense) and /morph/ (1993) - unless the Slashdot readership can report earlier uses?"
Just a bizarre peak around 1940's.
Bombs falling, V2 rockets, mad dash for jet fighters... not surprising the entire culture is leaping into the future.
Scary shit, actually.
I wouldnt classify avatar and morph as "science fiction" words persay. Rather it might be more logical to classify them as "scientific" or "technological", because they are not just used in fiction but rather in everyday speech to refer to real things...
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
A lot of the dates seem awfully late. For instance, for "cloaking device" they list 1996(!) and 1981 editions of books, while mentioning that, oh hey, Star Trek may have used the phrase "cloaking device" in the sixties, but we'd need to see the script to verify.
I don't understand: why does a usage have to be on paper to count for this project?
dinosaur comics
I received for Christmas, "The Meaning of Everything", by Simon Winchester. This gives a very interesting and compelling account of the genesis of the dictionary, some of the very strange characters who contributed and the process by which entries are constructed. A very interesting read.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Somebody at Stanford has done research into the word 'morph'. It came into widespread use with the debut of Michael Jackson's Black or White video of 1991. I wrote the software for that video at PDI (Pacific Data Images) in 1990, and presented it at Siggraph in 1992.
Interestingly, ILM was pushing hard for the alternative 'morf' spelling, and we spent considerable effort seeding our preferred 'morph' spelling into the trade press. Fortunately for us, we were working on music videos and television commercials that showed off the technique well, and ILM only used their tool for a few shots in a few movies.
I think that Black or White is still the most impressive morph ever done -- probably because we spent about six person-months refining it. Jamie Dixon and Amie Slate did the bulk of the work for that video.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
1. Morph is not greek, morphos is. 2. They're looking specifically for the sf uses of those words, not the first occurrence of the word with any definition. The way the OED works is that it tries to find the earliest printed occurrences of each definition of a word. "Avatar" in the sense of "a representative face/person/attribute of a god," the Sanskrit meaning, is different from the sf sense of "an electronic representation of a person which is not visually mimetic" or however you want to define these: so the OED would want the first *English* use of the first meaning (probably in the 18th or 19th century, whenever Sanskrit studies was just starting out) and the first English use of the second meaning (probably when the first muds and moos came out, 70s or 80s).