Incorporating Decorporation

An Oxford English Dictionary entry has been written for a word whose earliest attestation seems to be in a letter sent by a professor of biochemistry to the late Professor Norman Davis, medievalist and former Merton Professor of English at Oxford.

In October 1957, a few months after Bob Burchfield had taken up the post of Editor of the Supplement to the OED, J. N. Davidson, who was Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Glasgow, wrote to Professor Davis, at that time also at Glasgow, about the word decorporation:

'In some of the work which we are carrying out at the present time, we allow radioactive substances to be incorporated into various chemical components of the living cell. Afterwards we allow the activity to be released by a process which is known in laboratory slang as "decorporation".

Our real difficulties relate to the use of this word. It does not exist in the dictionary, but it expresses very adequately our ideas of the process in question. I have a feeling, however, that it may be utterly revolting and barbarous usage to anyone like yourself who has a finer feeling for language than we have. I wonder if you would care to let me know whether you would regard it as completely unsuitable in polite usage to indicate the reverse of the process of incorporation?'

Davidson's letter is now in our files. Davis sent it to Burchfield with the following scribbled at the top:

'R.W.B. I had just thrown this out when it struck me that it might give you the VERY first quotation for the modern use of this word (it does appear once in OED but quite different in sense & quite dead). It remains, of course, to be seen whether it will catch on; but you might like to file this & see. ND. 9.x.'

How far-sighted Professor Davis was. Decorporation is now established in scientific vocabulary, along with the back-formed verb decorporate. But we have been unable to find it in print as early as this letter of 1957. So the new OED entry stands with Davidson's letter as the first quotation.

The matter would not have come to light had not Dr Darrell R. Fisher in the U.S. written to us in 1996, recommending the inclusion of decorporation, which he described as laboratory slang. It was his suggestion that prompted us to look in the quotation files to see what material we had on the word.