From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/5962 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Jamie Vicary Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: The humility topos Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2010 13:26:52 +0100 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Jamie Vicary NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1278510067 29798 80.91.229.12 (7 Jul 2010 13:41:07 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2010 13:41:07 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Categories list To: Vaughan Pratt Original-X-From: categories@mta.ca Wed Jul 07 15:41:06 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mailserv.mta.ca ([138.73.1.1]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OWUs5-0000W1-Hz for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:41:05 +0200 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1OWU9R-0001DF-DV for categories-list@mta.ca; Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:54:57 -0300 In-Reply-To: Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:5962 Archived-At: > 1. =A0Volume Ti-Tz of the OED does not contain the word "topos," nor does= it > appear under the entries for "humility" or "literary." =A0(Ordinarily the= OED > can relied on to record just about every English word that has appeared i= n > print prior to the 20th century.) I have access to the full online version of the OED, which does contain the word topos. The earliest citation it has is to a 1948 work of Leo Spitzer, who was apparently a linguist and literary historian. Here is his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Spitzer He was Austrian, and it seems quite possible that he could have read Curtius' treatise in the original German and begun to use the word "topos" himself in the same year. [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]