The use of written word in these scenarios is always interesting to me. I have video of me and some friends using the word "asshat" predating their first recorded usage by almost a decade. (I have no idea why I remembered that video when reading this... but here it is on my hard drive)
Ironically in a similar context, a bunch of punk rockers talking about someone in a band we didn't like!
I always wonder how many words have an etymology which predates written use significantly due to the "class" of people who use that word. This certainly seems to be a minor case at least.
It's pretty much universal. Etymologists and lexicographers know that most words were in use for some time before being written -- anywhere from years to centuries. They try to make inferences by other means, as best they can.
They gradually expand the corpus they can search. A lot of words that are attributed to Shakespeare are gradually finding earlier sources, often in manuscripts. They knew all along that Shakespeare wasn't the first person to use a word (a common myth), but that his works were widely printed and thus survived.
Those manuscripts still don't include spoken usages, and show only the use by the class of people who could write. But it is solid data, before they go off into more tenuous hypotheses.
Some of the earliest recorded usages are found in court transcripts, where they wrote things down verbatim. One case from 1310 involved Roger F--kebythenavele. https://www.google.com/search?q=roger+by-the-navele
> I always wonder how many words have an etymology which predates written use significantly due to the "class" of people who use that word
I studied a bit of Shakespeare at university, and my awesome lecturer (https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/619) was always very clear to note that for many phrases "Shakespeare was the first to write it down", which is quite different to "Shakespeare made up this phrase / word".
To your point, he of course was attempting to write for a variety of classes, including the illiterate (his plays weren't written to be published, that only happened after his death - they were ephemera to be performed and witnessed). His success may very well have come from using many phrases that the "lower class" would have recognised from use not just inference.
There are certainly academics who collect and study spoken language corpora, not just written - it’s very much a matter of what gets collected and catalogued though. The fact that early citations here are from Usenet speaks to the availability and search ability of that corpus much more than to its role in the origination of written speech. Transcripts of IRC and MUDs and aim chats are not collected and indexed, so they don’t get referenced.
Similarly with spoken corpora it tends to be things like interviews with old people created to preserve dialect recordings, or material from local radio news - rather than random conversations among young people.
I guess by virtue of ‘tape in the studio just kept rolling’ there might be rather more recorded examples of band members chatting away over the years than of other similar aged groups.
Ironically in a similar context, a bunch of punk rockers talking about someone in a band we didn't like!
I always wonder how many words have an etymology which predates written use significantly due to the "class" of people who use that word. This certainly seems to be a minor case at least.