July | 2015 | Richard Fox's blog

omg Jason yeh he sez av u see about their like tryin to find out wen ppl started usin the word numpty yeh i sez well ur 1 u should kno and he laughed yeh so I’m like wat’s all that about then so he says well it’s awsum reely cos they’re like trackin it down using all this reserch like on the internet and stuff so I’m like ok, what kind of research and he says well there’s quite a few issues around it cos like it’s soooo difficult to find out exackly when it started bein used but I thought I might fone them up and see if I could help so I said wow that would be awesome in fact I’ve already done that he said so I was really stoked cos he’d reached out to them in that way but I’ve always bigged him up and I’m so proud for him when he achieves all these amazing things in the field of grammar and stuff and clearly he’s now in a good space which is exactly wat I always thought right from the getgo though as he says no doubt there will be some issues around doing complex textual research but I wanna give a big shout-out for Jason because whenever he becomes involved in etymology and linguistics and anything language-related I have every confidence that he’ll produce an outstanding piece of scholarship, worthy of the standards of august bodies such as the Oxford English Dictionary, who are undertaking this study, yeh?

OED appeals: can you help us find earlier evidence of the word ‘numpty’?