by KYW's Dr. Marciene Mattleman
Jon Simon calls himself a detective. Recently, he learned that the word “dick”, meaning a policeman, was first used in 1912. Jon is a word sleuth -- finding information for the Oxford English Dictionary.
The dictionary, known as O.E.D. started in 1857, was expected to take ten years to finish. But, because new words kept entering English, the first edition wasn’t completed until 1928. Jon traces word origins and phrases and estimates that he’s researched 10,000 words since 1990.
According to an article in The Washington Post, a word detective’s favorite assignment is finding the earliest published example of a word or phrase. Jon found “bad hair day” in 1988 in a California newspaper. When he phoned the writer of the story, she said she heard it from her teenage kids.
Jon goes anywhere to find words, but spends most of his time at the Library of Congress with obscure journals and rare books. His favorite story is about a chef from Mexico, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, who first made a tortilla-chip-and-cheese concoction-- and we got a new food!
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