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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Imagine trying to properly attribute that quote around 1925. You remember you heard it or read it somewhere, but you're not entirely sure where you heard it and the only option is to dig through years of multiple papers hoping to find the right one.

And even if you pulled off that headache inducing task, you have no real way of knowing if the source you found did the same work to properly attribute the quote. It's really easy to see how it'd be misattributed/altered over time, and reminds me how great grep truly is.

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William Safire had a column "On Language" in The New York Times for many years which, as I recall, would sometimes get into the etymology of words (which dictionaries like the OED often document to some degree) and phrases--and maybe quotations. I think some of the research was what we would now call crowdsourcing.

Of course, the flip side of this for many people is that if something isn't on the Web it doesn't really exist.

> if something isn't on the Web it doesn't really exist.

Speaking of etymologies, while I'd guess that phrase itself has been reinvented many times, I think the first time I heard it was in 2000, from Tim Berners-Lee.

It was the one time I was meeting with him, and he'd just pulled a third person into the meeting, and I'd probably just mentioned to them that a document was under patent embargo.

TBL laughingly asked the other, something like, "What's that, [someone?] just said, 'If it's not on the Web, it doesn't exist.'?"

Lexicographic Irregulars was his name for the crowd.

https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/remembering-th...

I also love the reference to "word nerd" in that piece. (It's what we call the internal style guide group that I'm in at my company.)

You would get a book similar to the "Oxford Dictionary of Quotations". I'm not sure which specific book existed back then with that content, but books that handled these types of very specific deep dives into a subject were very common.

Read some very old stories and you might get a flavor for how life worked back then - people didn't just throw their hands up and give up, there were usable options to find this stuff out - the reference section of your local library was very important.

The types of books don't exist much these days for obvious reasons.

Didn’t see that plot twist coming!

Personally I'd like to see more parables that end with a lesson (however tenuously connected) about the value of a particular gnu/linux tool

  and that's how I came to truly appreciate nl

Thank you, I've been piping to cat -n for line numbering. This is really flexible!

... and that is how I came to appreciate curl.

Imagine trying to properly attribute that quote in 1000 BC. English hasn’t yet been invented. You’re stranded; a time traveler with one pointless mandate from an internet poster’s imagination. How do you subsist?

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