One wonders what motivated the reporter to use the verb materialize, in quotes, when reporting that a Common Council meeting didn't happen as scheduled.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CAROLE OSTERINK
Monday, October 31, 2016
Noted in the Newspaper
This little item, discovered in the Hudson Daily Evening Register for November 8, 1889, demanded sharing.
One wonders what motivated the reporter to use the verb materialize, in quotes, when reporting that a Common Council meeting didn't happen as scheduled.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CAROLE OSTERINK
One wonders what motivated the reporter to use the verb materialize, in quotes, when reporting that a Common Council meeting didn't happen as scheduled.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CAROLE OSTERINK
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Since the date is November 8 perhaps the Common Council meeting was on Halloween and, hence, why no one 'materialized'. Just a thought! And, gosh, how long has that Common Council been around anyway?
ReplyDeleteI expect the Common Council has been around since the city was incorporated in 1785.
DeleteThe reporter probably used quotation marks because this was a relatively early use of the word in this sense. (Used this way, the quotation marks are called scare quotes; they tell the reader, "'This is not my term' or 'This is not how the term is usually applied,'" to quote the Chicago Manual of Style.) In the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest example of "materialize" in this sense ("To come into perceptible existence; to become actual fact; to 'come off'") dates to 1885. The OED labels it "orig. U.S. in journalistic use," which is attested to by a quotation in the OED from the July 23, 1898, issue of the (British) Spectator: "The Protestant revolters from the Unionist party failed, as the Americans say, to materialise."
ReplyDeleteThank you, Rachel! The first use cited in the OED is 1885, and it appears in the Daily Evening Register in 1889? Once again, Hudson seems to have been quite cutting edge in the 19th century.
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