Gleanings from HuangSupplement
Neologisms in a dictionary can enter the user’s vocabulary. Scholars used to believe that 愛人(2) wasn’t used in natural texts until the late 1910s after 英華大辭典 (1908) borrowed it from 雙解英和大辭典. It’s now turned up in a serialised novel from 1909, which is only to be expected.
The etymology of 方言 doesn’t change the fact that its current sense is largely determined by how the English term dialect is understood in modern linguistics.
The phrase [守道][愛國]者 doesn’t constitute an attestation of 愛國者.
All twenty-four of the Standard Histories were in existence by c1739, but the name 二十四史 came only in c1791.
安樂椅子 wasn’t initially found in the Hand Book of New Terms and Newspaper Chinese because 樂 got dropped in HathiTrust’s OCR layer.
Kaufman (2012) notes:
Often, in reading those publications, one comes across words not in the lexica sitting right next to unusual words that are included! What is going on? My explanation for this strange state of affairs, based on my own experience reading new (to me) materials, is that words of obvious meaning in their context never had to be looked up, hence those sage European scholars never realized that they were missing from the dictionaries! Computerized analysis programs are far less likely to miss such things, however, so the more texts we input into our databases the more we learn, be they well-known texts or only recently published ones.
The following texts are commonly cited in scholarship from a modern paraphrase instead of the original version:
Always use a checklist of editions!
Yang (2021) notes that the figurative use of 榨取 was imported from Japanese a year earlier than the physical sense. The transmission of polysemous loanwords has its own logic. See also s.v. 病毒.
Chao (2016) reads 西洋布丁、香肉、果水、安息、蘇合油 for the correct 西洋布、丁香、肉果、水安息、蘇合油.
The Hand Book of New Terms and Newspaper Chinese (1917) was the 2nd edition of New Terms for New Ideas (1913). Words first attested in the former shouldn’t be dated to 1913.
汽車 was train in the 19th century.
Lin’s 嚴禁本地民人與外人非法往來交易告示 (1839), including the very title, is a translation of the English version:
為迄今中外資料中未見原文者，現按英文譯回來。