Thank you! I really enjoyed your live podcast session too (when I heard the topic, have to admit that I immediately thought of Túrin, because, well, so much chaos and calamity, but you did a great job of making the case for a much less well known character!) And the slides/memes were on point 😁

(Yes, as a Canadian it is always particularly good fun when I get to help add Canadian English words to the Oxford English Dictionary!)

And how to find the time to try all of them (in the name of scientific research, naturally - surely writing these definitions would be easier if I had tasted more of the things I am writing about)?

GM is already in! And DM is definitely on a watchlist. I am now curious about "conductor", which I haven't run across in a TTRPG-specific context before. How would you use it / what sort of meaning does it have in a gaming context?

(And then of course we have many external experts whom we consult as well, if it's something from a language where we don't have extensive expertise in-house!)

As for the etymology, we have a team of about a dozen etymologists (all with different backgrounds and specialties) who research each one.

Not quite a committee - more of a massive database of suggestions that we track; when we find that there's enough evidence from a wide variety of sources over a substantial period of time, a suggestion is assigned to an editor (me or one of my colleagues!) to research: www.oed.com/information/...

That the 1856 quotation refers to the phrase as a "maxim" does make me wonder if there might be earlier evidence out there, that I simply haven't turned up yet...

(The obligatory caveats to all of this are a) the phrase/advice may well have been in use in spoken language before it was written down, and b) this sort of research is very dependent on the texts accessible in the databases/library resources one has access to.)

"Now there's the secret for you, children. Always write about what you know, and it will not be such hard work, after all."

"One day somebody asked one of these same little boys why it was that he liked to write compositions so well... After a minute, he said: 'I guess it's 'cause I always write about what I know.' (continued)

(reprinted several places, including the Lafayette Daily Courier, Feb. 18, 1865, but also the Ohio Educational Monthly for April 1865 - the following is the text as printed in the Lafayette Daily Courier):

But there are also plenty of repetitions of this advice from the same (or slightly earlier) period that make no reference to Emerson. As, for instance, this 1865 article by Date Thorne entitled "Something about Composition":

"Indeed, if Emerson's advice had been followed generally in this volume, 'Write what you know', even the commissioner's work would probably have occupied much less than 105 pages."

However, by 1873, the phrase was already somewhat associated with him, at least enough for a reviewer in the journal Old & New (Volume VIII, August 1873) to write:

... *but* I cannot find that Ralph Waldo Emerson actually used the exact phrase himself in print (though he may, of course, have expressed something similar in conversation!)

In at least one later edition of Emerson's diaries (Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Volume VIII, published 1912), this latter (1855) passage is described in the Table of Contents as "Write what you know"...

In a 1855 entry Emerson makes a similar comment: "I hold that a wise man will write nothing but that which is known only to himself."