David Shulman, 92, Prolific ‘Big Apple’ Lexicographer

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

David Shulman, who died October 27 at age 92, was a word detective, prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, cryptographer and cryptologist, anagrammic poet, and general expert on all things lexicographical.

Among the longest-resident denizens of the rare book room at the New York Public Library, Shulman’s absence in recent weeks was noted by increasingly apprehensive staffers. He discovered the library at age 12 and basically never left – except when it was closed.

His death was first announced on the American Dialect Society Web site, where etymologists of many stripes eulogized Shulman as a language maven.

Thanks to Shulman, the 3rd edition of the OED has more accurate and, in many cases, older citations for hundreds of words, among them jazz; doozy (not from the Dusenberg automobile, as previously had been cited); snowman, and Big Apple, which he traced to an anti-New York screed published in 1909.

A contributor to etymological journals as well, Shulman theorized that the word Manhattan was Delaware Indian for “the place where we all get drunk,” although this was not verified. A 300-page scholarly tome he co-authored about the history of the term hot dog is in press at the University of Missouri.

Shulman was also blessed with an enthusiasm for New York history, especially the kind that can be pursued through musty stacks of newspapers and issues of the Police Gazette. He told friends that he had recently completed a manuscript contending that Bowery celebrity saloonkeeper Steve Brodie really did jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886. Many sources in intervening years – including the New York Times in Brodie’s 1901 obituary – have denied it.

Shulman was born in 1912 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants and grew up speaking Yiddish at Henry Street on the Lower East Side. Years later in a letter in the Times, he complimented author Tom Wolfe for using the phrase “big makher” correctly. (Shulman must have mailed hundreds of letters to the editor, because at least 50 were published, and he groused about how few got in.)

Shulman told The Jerusalem Report that he fell in love with lexicography while hanging around his local library in the Bronx, where the family had moved.

He graduated from City College in 1937 and found a job writing a column called “Can You…?” for the World Telegram and other newspapers that consisted of word puzzles and trivia. (Example: “Can You … Take two letters from five to leave four? Yes. Take F and E from FIVE and you leave IV. Catch a Glasgow magistrate in a fish net? Yes. Glasgow magistrate is a nickname for a kind of herring.”

Shulman served for a time as president of the New York unit of the American Cryptogram Association. A report on a convention of the group in 1952 disclosed that members addressed one another by proxy names. Shulman’s was Ab Struse. Other members chose anagrams of their real names.

Shulman, meanwhile, showed himself a virtuoso at anagramming in his sonnet “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” in which each of the poem’s 14 lines is an anagram of its title. (A hard, howling, tossing water scene:/Strong tide was washing hero clean./”How cold!” Weather stings as in anger./O Silent night shows war ace danger!) The poem was often reprinted as a curiosity.

In recent years he had moved to an assisted-living facility in Bay Ridge, from which he commuted daily more than an hour each way to the library at Times Square. He was a familiar sight on the library stairs in his ragged windbreaker, carrying a large plastic bag filled with papers and dog-eared index cards in one hand. A librarian who knew Shulman, Robert Scott, said he had produced drawings to go along with a book of poems Shulman was trying to get published. “He was more excited about the poems than even he was about the hot dog book,” recalled his co-author of that book, Gerald Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla. Mr. Cohen credited Shulman with “pointing the way” toward college humor as being the source of the phrase, rather than Coney Island vendors or a cartoonist who’d been served a frankfurter by stadium food pioneer Harry Stevens, as some had posited. Another independent word researcher, Barry Popkin -the third co-author of the book – made the actual discovery, in a Yale humor magazine, in 1895. The phrase was a tasteless college jape referring to the common belief – apparently with a basis in fact – that sausages frequently contained dog meat.

Shulman never married, but had many friends and correspondents, including H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Heywood Broun, and the magician Ricky Jay. Late in life he told friends that the only family he had was two nieces, from whom he was completely estranged after they tried to prevent him from donating his extensive collections of cryptographic materials and ephemera to the library.

Among these were an unused ticket to the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, the first printed book on ephemera, from 1518, and 20,000 19th-century postcards.

During World War II, Shulman joined the Army 2nd Signal Corps Battalion, where he worked decoding Japanese intercepts, then went back to working for newspapers. He went into “semi-retirement” in the mid-1950s and apparently rarely earned money after that, except for some small payments for his citation work for the OED.

The American editor of the OED, Jesse Sheidlower, credited Shulman with sending in literally tens of thousands of citations, making him one of the dictionary’s most prolific contributors. “He would read unusual sources – sensationalistic novels and trade magazines – the language in them is very interesting, closer to the colloquial,” said Mr. Sheidlower.

Shulman was particularly proud of his dictionary citations, seeing them as contributions to the English language. When the OED accepted his early citation for Big Apple in 1989 – and shortly after the mayor had bestowed an award on a rival etymologist whose citation was more than a decade later – a gleeful Shulman told the Times, “Mayor Koch, William Safire, Merriam-Webster, and other wordmongers, take heed!”


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use