Thursday, May 17, 2007

Word Origins: Imagineering, continued (1942)

As a follow-up to Tuesday's story about the origins of the word "Imagineering," I found a January 22, 1942 article from The Cullman Banner (Cullman, Alabama). Below is an excerpt from the story as well as the story in its entirety.

New Noun - War brings new words - or bring back old ones in new attire. Remember "camouflage," "strafing," "canteen" and "doughboy" of World War I? Here's a brand-new one, a child of World War II: "imagineering." A combination of imagination and engineering, it's defined as "the fine art of deciding where we go from here," and it just grew (like Topsy) in the research laboratories of Aluminum Company of America.


See also:
Word Origins: Imagineering (1940s)

1 comment:

Janet said...

Hi I love your blog. And I also love word origins. I have access to NY Times and Wall Street Journal full text and the earliest use I can find is in The New York Times, Oct 24, 1942. It was used in the title of a sermon "Christian 'Imagineering.'"

They put the word in quotes like that so it must have been a new word at the time.

It also appears in an ALCOA ad in the NY Times in November 19, 1942.