Earliest Recorded Usage

Famous quotes containing the words earliest, recorded and/or usage:

    Oh! snatch’d away in beauty’s bloom,
    On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;
    But on thy turf shall roses rear
    Their leaves, the earliest of the year;
    George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)

    The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
    Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)

    I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.
    —A.J. (Alfred Jules)