Sunday, May 13, 2007  Jaded on Safire  Barry Popik has an
unapologetic agenda against William Safire. It's only partly
personal. It's mostly decent scholarship. On the ADS-L he has
identified the amateur linguist's most recent lapse.  Safire in
his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine this
week makes the following observation:  The warm old phrase
you’re welcome is rapidly disappearing from the language of
civility. Though the word welcome first appeared in “Beowulf,”
the O.E.D. notes that the whole phrase surfaced in print in
1907. We have now come to the 100th anniversary of the birth of
our acknowledgment of someone’s expression of gratitude. I was
driven to send the following message to him. He'll ignore it I'm
sure. ...Beowulf may be the first documentation of the word. To
argue otherwise would take more time and effort than a simple
missive should require.  But I must take issue with your claim
that 1907 was the earliest that the entire phrase "you're
welcome" was cited. The OED does cit