THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

It sounds like Murray Chass is confused here. (No surprise there.) He seems to be confusing the technical term “multitasking” with the same word in general usage. He’s probably right that the word was not in use until the 1990’s, in the sense of a person, as opposed to a computer, attending to more than one thing at a time. I certainly don’t remember it being used in the latter sense before the early nineties.

Chuck: no, we were using it as verb for humans, not in its original definition for computers.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was first used as a computer term in 1966. As referring to humans, they say it was 1998.

Well, they are wrong, which is not a surprise. 

It was used by at least one person at my school, sometime between 1987 and 1990.  I presume it was used as a verb as it applies to humans by at least one person at some point between 1966 and 1986.

Now, I presume it was used by thousands or millions of people by 1998, which is the date you are quoting.

To call a specific year as to when it was “generally” used may certainly be a question of opinion.

My public library allows me to search the history of the Globe and Mail newspaper online.

In the 1970s, there was one use of the word, in a help-wanted ad for a computer job at 3M.  (In 1971.)

In the 1980s, there were lots.  I couldn’t check them all, but I ignored most of the ones in special sections (often computer sections) and the business section.  I checked a couple elsewhere, and they were computer-related.

On March 4, 1992, a TV reporter talked about “the multi-tasking guys from [the TV show] “Emergency"."

So that’s an upper bound for earliness.

Aha!

January 8, 1991, column by Thomas Hurka: “If I were a computer, this would be called “multi-tasking"."

That’s a pretty good indication that it wasn’t in general use at the time, although it probably was among computer people, even computer people talking about humans.

I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that when UNIX came out, some unix admin somewhere said “I’m multitasking”, just as someone said “I googled it”.

It was a kid in my class in the late 1980s who said “I’m multitasking” in explaining that he was doing homework while watching TV.  I refuse to believe that that fool was the first one to coin the phrase.

1998 seems a little late to me for a general usage of “multitasking”. However, I doubt that they’re far off. They aren’t looking for the first use of a word. Also, saying that you knew someone in the late eighties who used the word, so lots of people must have been using it, doesn’t count as an example. That’s like saying that you know Joe Blow will hit sixty homers next season because you saw him hit a gargantuan shot and that can’t be the only time he did that.

Since determining when a word, or a specific meaning for a word, entered the language is a matter of looking into the past, dictionaries usually go for examples of it in print, as in newspapers, magazines, and books. The reasoning is that it is unlikely that a word would enter general usage without appearing in one of those venues. Criticize that standard if you wish, but that’s the way it generally works.

I went to the forums on the Word Origins web site and asked about “multitasking”. A lot of people knowledgeable in these matters hang out there. Someone there went to the Newspaper Archive site and did a search. He found the first usage of “multitasking” as a human skill in 1991. A 1987 want ad asked for a secretary “to handle a
multi-task desk”, though it doesn’t appear that this use of “mult-task” suggests concurrency.

As you mentioned, deciding when a term has entered general usage is a matter of opinion. However, that’s often a putdown that’s usually meant to disparage the opinion. There are standards for determining when a word enters general usage, and they work pretty well.

Actually, I didn’t mean it as a putdown, so no need to infer the worst-case, even if that’s generally the intent.  The reason is because I am right here to answer the charge.

***

“doesn’t count as an example”

I said that I refuse to believe a fool could invent the word.  And I said I don’t remember it being new or novel.  So, it’s not some single instance. 

I think it’s easy to see how a unix administrator in the 1970s, working on a computer that allows for multi-tasking to say that he’s multitasking, just the same as google become a verb.

***

I don’t know that multitasking would need to appear in print or other such medium.  It is after all a word you would speak and almost never write if you are talking about yourself.  I would say “I’m multitasking” would be far more common than “He’s multitasking” or “You’re multitasking”.  And, if you are multitasking, you would not write you are multitasking.

So, the way to figure out when a word general came up would not necessarily have to follow the time-tested methods that normally would happen.

Interesting site you pointed to:
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/1689/

(Also interesting that they use the same software as my blog.)

And if you see that kind of usage in a 1987 ad (not exactly what I said, since it’s used as a noun there, but definitely for a human), it’s easy to see how it could have been a verb say in 1985 or 1982.

Thanks for the reference…

I am far too young to actually remember, but I wonder, Tango, if the word was used to apply to humans in 1980’s, but primarily among the community of people who were more familiar with computers, while its human-applied usage did not become prevalent in less technically inclined people until the mid-1990’s?

Oh yeah, sure.  I would say that’s 100% definite.  Only a techie would create the word multitask as a verb.

Presumably this merely depends on which dictionary you consider. Some will try to be as broad as possible and contain every word, but most are limited in size.

Also, “google” as a verb is much more common than “multitasking”.

"Multitask” has transferred to the non-computer realm (meaning people use the word in contexts that have nothing to do with computers).  “Google” hasn’t, at least not yet. 

“Google” is also an interesting example of a word for a corporate brand that became the generic word for something.

"The dictionary” doesn’t exist, nor does the dictionary of the English language or of American English. Their editorial strategies differ, which should be understood partly as competition. Read the introductory material in your favorite print dictionary. (It’s very good in the American Heritage.)

Visit the Oxford English Dictionary “Latest new entries” for December 2009 which features “the alphabetical range refund-reputeless”. Read the five line preface and skim the five subsections of new entries.
http://oed.com/help/updates/latest-additions.html

“multi-task” was one of 2200 new and revised entries announced June 2003.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-102747789.html

Does “the record book” cover 162-game and 154-game schedules separately? Does it cover aggregate records for Montreal 1969-2004? Does it cover homeruns by batters named in the Mitchell Report?

Does “the dictionary” cover “multi-task” or “multitask” or “rofl” or “roflmao”?

These are similar questions.

Did anyone not find it hysterical that instead of a quick google search, Murray Chass actually called up Houghton Mifflin and had the employee there read him the definition.

Has “over the hill” been added to any idiomatic dictionary?

Murray also complained that the red/green books were no longer being printed for him and mailed to him, but instead available as a PDF for him to print at home.  He didn’t like it.

He shouldn’t like it. It’s one more example of erosion: degradation of the goods and services freely provided to the New York Times and that ilk. (The mainstream media? the BBWAA? I don’t know who did get the red and green books, but that detail is beside the point.)

That “nice lady at Houghton Mifflin” represents another freely provided service, one which hasn’t yet eroded for Murray. If she wouldn’t tell me the edition when a particular word first appeared in AHD (and I suppose she wouldn’t), then it is also another example supporting the mainstream media, or the mass media, or whoever does get that service.