precursor, alliteration, yellow books, predate, antedatings

Back when being the chief executive of General Motors meant something, one of G.M.’s leaders, Charles Erwin Wilson, became the secretary of defense and was widely known by a nickname, Engine Charlie. Decades later, a marketer is centering a campaign on an alliterative alternative, Engine Eddie.

Precursors

Many of the concepts did not originate within the original UK Government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) project to develop ITIL. According to IBM:

“	In the early 1980s, IBM documented the original Systems Management concepts in a four-volume series called A Management System for Information Systems. These widely accepted “yellow books,” ... were key inputs to the original set of ITIL books."[2][3]

precursor Hide phonetics
noun [C] SLIGHTLY FORMAL
something which happened or existed before another thing, especially if it either developed into it or had an influence on it:
Sulphur dioxide is the main precursor of acid rain.
Biological research has often been a precursor to medical breakthroughs which benefit patients.

比喻 Yellow Book USA is a phone and address directory listing service and publisher of independent telephone directories, based in Rockville Centre (Long Island), New York.

al・lit・er・a・tion

━━ n. 頭韻（法）.
al・lit・er・ate　━━ v. 頭韻を踏む［踏ます］.

Alliteration, the audible repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or within words, is part of the sound stratum of poetry.


Alliteration was the organizing device of Anglo-Saxon poetry, predating rhyme, but it was dying out by the 14th century until a group of poets established what has been called an “alliterative revival.” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” inevitably evokes its precursor, “Beowulf,” which has been powerfully translated by Seamus Heaney, who provides the model for Armitage’s enterprise. Alliteration didn’t predominate in later metrical verse, but it is a rough current in Sir Thomas Wyatt, if you listen, and thereafter becomes a subterranean stream in English-language poetry. It comes bubbling to the surface in 19th-century English poets, like Swinburne and Hopkins, who use it with startling boldness, and 20th-century Welsh poets, like David Jones and Dylan Thomas.




Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Pygmalion. 1916.
HIGGINS [indignantly] I swear! [Most emphatically] I never swear. I detest the habit. What the devil do you mean?

MRS. PEARCE [stolidly] Thats what I mean, sir. You swear a great deal too much. I dont mind your damning and blasting, and what the devil and where the devil and who the devil—

HIGGINS. Mrs. Pearce: this language from your lips! Really!

MRS. PEARCE [not to be put off]—but there is a certain word I must ask you not to use. The girl has just used it herself because the bath was too hot. It begins with the same letter as bath. She knows no better: she learnt it at her mother's knee. But she must not hear it from your lips. 165

HIGGINS [loftily] I cannot charge myself with having ever uttered it, Mrs. Pearce. [She looks at him steadfastly. He adds, hiding an uneasy conscience with a judicial air] Except perhaps in a moment of extreme and justifiable excitement.

MRS. PEARCE. Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to the butter, and to the brown bread.

HIGGINS. Oh, that! Mere alliteration, Mrs. Pearce, natural to a poet.

MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, whatever you choose to call it, I beg you not to let the girl hear you repeat it.

******

The new edition, with a new introductory essay by language expert David Crystal on the History of English, includes 2,500 new words and senses, plus thousands of antedatings of existing words, drawing on the huge ongoing research project for the Oxford English Dictionary and the wealth of information on language in use provided by the Oxford English Corpus.

Definition

antedate Show phonetics
verb [T]
FORMAL FOR predate
predate Hide phonetics
verb [T] SLIGHTLY FORMAL
to have existed or happened before another thing:
These cave paintings predate any others which are known.
Compare backdate; postdate.