<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-45-1427066-45,00.html>
The Times of London January 06, 2005 David Shulman Literary detective who sniffed out the origins of many new words FROM 1879, when James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, published his call for readers, the dictionary has had many eccentric contributors. These ranged from Dr Fitzedward Hall, the American recluse and Sanskrit expert, to William Chester Minor, the murderer and Broadmoor inmate, believed to be responsible for about 10,000 citations. The dictionary is still dependent on layman lexicographers for help in charting the unspooling vagaries of the English language, and one of its most dedicated such helpers was David Shulman. Shulman was a typical New York eccentric. Clad in an anorak and baseball cap and carrying a plastic bag stuffed with sheets of paper, he haunted the rare books room of the New York Public Library for half his life. A connoisseur of the colloquial, he would work his way through pulp novels, trade magazines and old copies of the Police Gazette, hunting for early uses, variant spellings or contrasting shades of meaning. A 300-page study of the earliest use of the term "hot dog " is in production, for which Shulman was a third responsible. Shulman's detective hobbies - he described himself as a "literary Sherlock Holmes" - were a matter of personal as much as professional pride. He once spent months ransacking old issues of Delicatessen, the defunct trade paper, to disprove the validity of a rare spelling of "pastrami" in Webster's. "I figure that patience will pay off in the long run," he once said, "and so far, it always has." He also claimed to have been responsible for the inclusion in the OED of the word "snowman", and to have found the earliest citation for "bagel". Shulman was born in the Bronx in 1912 and educated at City College. He then took work as a compiler of puzzles for the World Post and the New York Post, before - he said - working for the US Army as a cryptanalyst. In the 1950s he set up his own company to produce word puzzles, and in 1976 he published An Annotated Bibliography of Cryptography. Shulman was also an avid collector of American ephemera. He donated to the city library a vast collection of cryptographic material - including a prized 16th-century text on secret writing. In his eighties he passed over a mass of documents, ranging from a stack of 20,000 postcards to a ticket for the impeachment trial of the US President Andrew Johnson. He had no immediate family. His library survives him. David Shulman, etymologist, was born on November 12, 1912. He died on October 30, 2004, aged 91. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]