"Is a thing" antedated to 1783
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In the comments on my post "When did 'a thing' become a thing", 4/18/2016,, James Barrett points us to a video from the Royal Society that includes the following passage from a letter, dated 1783, from one Eberhard Johann Schröter in St. Petersburg, addressed to Dr. Daniel Solander, an associate of Sir Joseph Banks:
If any body could be thoroughly convinced that a prediction of winds is a thing and possible and real, then to such a person a proper classification of them would be useful.
(This letter was selected to be read because its card was the very last item in the card catalogue of the Royal Society's library.)
This citation suggests that the "is a thing" usage has always been Out There in platonic Idiom World, and may have been incarnated many times through history before it finally caught the memetic brass ring. And never mind that Eberhard Schröter was presumably not a native speaker of English.
Lee Sullivan said,
April 23, 2016 @ 2:33 pm
Amazing, totally, and just the kind of Thing that interests me. I want to know more, not just about things but about everything etymological.
mike said,
April 23, 2016 @ 2:59 pm
"This citation suggests that the "is a thing" usage has always been Out There in platonic Idiom World, and may have been incarnated many times through history before it finally caught the memetic brass ring."
This is my favorite sentence this week. :-)
Dennis said,
April 23, 2016 @ 3:51 pm
It seems to me that there are 2 different meanings to the phrase. One which deals with existence in a platonic way and one which deals with activities. So that, in the clip above, the author seems to question whether something is possible and real, whereas, if someone talked about Irish hamster porn, I might ask if that were a thing in that would someone be downloading that. The latter is similar to the '60s phrase, "Doing my own thing" which refers to actions rather than objects.
David Marjanović said,
April 23, 2016 @ 5:44 pm
Well, I really don't mind that, because I'm not aware of any remotely similar phrase in any kind of German – or French or Russian for that matter (the other relevant languages in 18th-century St. Petersburg).
maidhc said,
April 23, 2016 @ 6:46 pm
In a strange coincidence, immediately after reading this entry I came across a quotation from A. A. Milne: “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”
Michael Watts said,
April 23, 2016 @ 9:18 pm
Actually, it seems reasonable to me that the sorts of things non-native speakers say are especially likely to come from Platonic Idiom World rather than especially unlikely — they'll reflect the meaning the person had in mind a little more directly, without having been through a filter of "what do people conventionally say when they're speaking [English]?" But if the thought is common enough, eventually words will be pressed into service for it.
Bloix said,
April 23, 2016 @ 9:57 pm
German Ding was very much a key philosophical term at the time – Kant's ding an sich and Hegel's Das Ding were central concepts. Presumably Schroeter thought in German.
Sniffnoy said,
April 24, 2016 @ 9:56 am
This is neat! Though as noted on the previous thread, there's really two different uses here — "a thing" meaning "something real" (what's meant here), and "a thing" meaning "a socially recognized phenomenon". Antedating the latter seems like it remains a problem.
Phil Ramsden said,
April 24, 2016 @ 6:37 pm
Yes, as Bloix points out, the fact that Schröter may have been a German speaker isn't entirely irrelevant here.
Also, I'm not sure we're talking about the same (excuse me) thing. There's a sense of "to be a thing" which seems to me (on the basis of no evidence, like) to be older than, and different from, the one that's taken off recently. That older sense is purely ontological: to assert that something is a thing is, broadly, to assert that in some sense it's *real*. It's used in that sense in this TV review from 1981 by Clive James, for example: http://www.clivejames.com/books/glued/bagwash
I reckon that's not quite what we mean today when we say it–or at least, it's no longer the only meaning, though it may have been when the phrase started coming into vogue.
Bloix said,
April 25, 2016 @ 4:48 pm
troot is indeed a ting!
D'Arcy said,
April 26, 2016 @ 6:27 am
Never mind thing, it's nothing.