Site for phrase origins

November 18, 2006 11:09 AM

How can I find out who coined the term 'perverse incentive'?

The Oxford English Dictionary will usually give the first occurrence of a word.

I'm trying to find the equivalent for (obscure) terms and phrases. 'Perverse incentive' and 'duty to report' are a couple of examples.

It seems that a particular phrase acts as an anchor-point in the development of ideas. 'Tipping point' is a recent example.

The sites I've found through Google have thus far been more proverb-oriented.

Something like this Reverse Dictionary could prove useful. But a phrase is more particular than a word, and can usually be associated with an individual author.

posted by dragonsi55 to writing & language (4 comments total)

I would use Google as a whole -- just search for "phrase" coined or "phrase" "first used". Some of the results may be questionable, but it could give you a place to start. For instance, I searched '"perverse incentive" coined' and came up with this, which says it was coined by the Audit Commission in 1986. Not sure if that's true, but it's something.
posted by katemonster at 11:39 AM on November 18, 2006

And don't forget GoogleBooks; the first page of results gives a 1988 use (from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce) that implies it's already been around for a while. Aha, and here's a hit from 1983 (House Committee on Banking). This page says "This perverse incentive problem was first commented on by the Guillebaud Committee (1956)," but it's not clear whether the Committee used the phrase itself.

Man, I love Google.
posted by languagehat at 1:46 PM on November 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

Thank you, I'll start using 'coined' as a synonym for 'origin' and expand the search.

It looks like that reference mis-speaks, that 'applied' would've been a better word than 'coined'. I found references to the term from 1950's which didn't seem to feel the need for an explicit citation.

Google Scholar allows searching by the date of the original reference, which I haven't figured how to do in Google.
posted by dragonsi55 at 3:52 PM on November 18, 2006

languagehat, thanks, I somehow didn't know about GoogleBooks, which you rectified.

Tried 'duty to report' and for 1900-1950 and got a sense that it was more administrative than ethical at the time. But still couldn't find the original source.
posted by dragonsi55 at 4:00 PM on November 18, 2006