Saturday, April 26, 2008

Preposition post

Rodney Huddleston pointed out to me that I hadn't included post as a preposition in the Simple English Wiktionary. (I have since added it there and also to the main English Wiktionary.)

Post is one of English's newer prepositions. The OED has it from 1965,
"1965 Listener 16 Sept. 432/3 Der Ferne Klang is post-Wagnerian, and post just about everything else that was happening at the turn of the century.
1974 Daily Tel. 7 Jan. 13/3 Now, post the increase [in the price of oil],..future gold price prospects far outweigh individual share fundamentals."

About 15 minutes of quick and dirty searching through Google books wasn't able to turn up anything earlier. I also had a look through the Time corpus, the BNC, and the BYU Corpus of American English, but found that the part-of-speech tagging was uncharacteristically wrong when it came to post. There are thousands of hits for the preposition post, but I found not a single one that was actually a preposition.

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