Ross, I hope you’re reading this 
I came across this appeal from the OED/BBC. I quote:
- The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word. Quite a task! The fifty words on the OED’s BBC Wordhunt appeal list all have a date next to them – corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that? If so the BBC wants to hear from you.
And for the life of me I could not figure out why anyone would use an e-mail approach for doing this. Please please OED, BBC, whoever’s in charge, take a leaf out of Wikipedia. Make this a public wiki.
An etymological dictionary with real instances of usage, timed and dated, for all neologisms. Covering the last 30 years say. This has to be done via a wiki. And could be real fun.
It cannot be done any other way. Just cannot.