Talk:Tintinnabulation

Tintinnabulation only is a sound of a lingering bell after it has been struck

I seem to have found an occurrence of "tintinnabulation" or rather, "tintinnabulous" earlier than Edgar Allen Poe's poem - but I am no etymologist. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1821 according to Wikipedia, the author writes:

The persecutions of the chapel-bell, [...] the porter who rang it, [...] has ceased to disturb anybody; and I, and many others who suffered much from his tintinnabulous propensities, have now agreed to overlook his errors, and have forgiven him.

This can be found in the project Gutenberg HTML version of the text, in the first paragraph of the section INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM.

31.50.18.181 (talk) 16:54, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

The page should be deleted.

Why?

(1) The etymology is wrong. Edgar Allan Poe did not invent the word. etymonline.com: "the ringing of bells," 1823, from Latin.

Poe was 14 years old at that time.

(2) The word isn't noteworthy enough for Wikipedia. See number one.

This article is wrong, as has been noted since 2014, yet it remains on Wikipedia

I had always thought the word tintinnabulation had been coined by Edgar Allen Poe in his poem "The Bells," so I was surprised when I came across the word in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, chapter 12. The novel is said to have been written from 1846 through 1848. Poe's poem is thought to have been written in 1848 but wasn't published until 1849. It seemed likely that Chapter 12 was written before 1848, and I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dombey_and_Son (if we can believe Wikipedia at all) that Chapters 11–13 were originally published in January 1847.

From chapter 12:

   It was drowned in the tintinnabulation of the gong, which sounding
   again with great fury, there was a general move towards the
   dining-room; still excepting Briggs the story boy, who remained
   where he was, and as he was; and on its way to whom Paul presently
   encountered a round of bread, genteelly served on a plate and
   napkin, and with a silver fork lying crosswise on the top of it.

Yet this article (as well as, I think, many other sources) says Poe invented the word:

   Tintinnabulation is the lingering sound of a ringing bell that occurs after
   the bell has been struck. This word was invented by Edgar Allan Poe
   as used in the first stanza of his poem "The Bells."

Interestingly, the article provides an external link at the bottom to "Tintinnabulation" on www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary.com. That link goes to a page that says a few scrolls down:

   First Known Use of tintinnabulation
   1831, in the meaning defined at sense 1

And sense 1 is:

   tintinnabulation
   noun 
   1 : the ringing or sounding of bells

Also, I had always thought that Poe's use of tintinnabulation was the ringing/sounding of bells (as the above definition says), so I am not sure where this article's definition as "the lingering sound of a ringing bell that occurs after the bell has been struck" is derived.

I initially couldn't find a discussion page, so I sent this information as an e-mail to info-en@wikimedia.org and was told, "...the content of Wikipedia articles is decided by consensus amongst volunteer editors, based on what reliable, published sources say about topics. There is no central editorial board that is able to research matters such as this, so if you would like to suggest a change to the article, you should raise the issue at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tintinnabulation." When I went to this page, I saw that a recommendation to delete the article has been given, based partly on its incorrect attribution of the coinage of the word, and there is also a date of discussion of this inaccuracy of March 2014; however, one must follow a link to determine whether the word being discussed is "tintinnabulation" or just "tintinnabulous." Nonetheless, the fact that the likely inaccuracy of this article was reported as far back as 2014 and yet it still remains, misleading anyone who reads it, is rather disturbing.

Coincidentally, I have done on-line scoring of student essays that use various source materials in discussing whether Wikipedia should be allowed as a source in high school and college papers due to its proclivity for errors, quickly spreading false information, etc. The fact that this blatantly incorrect article has remained since a 2014 notation showing it is wrong tends to make me side with the sources that claim none of Wikipedia can be trusted.

Richard G. Mills (talk) 16:23, 24 July 2019 (UTC)