From correspondent G.D. yesterday:
… I had stumbled onto your blog [Language Log] by searching for the word astiperios — because a colleague of mine used it today to describe a student’s attitude. It’s a word I had never heard before (or seen in print), so I wanted to see if it was real, and what it meant. I’m curious how your adventure in tracing its roots started, and where it took you in the end.
G.D. is referring to a posting of mine from, omigod, 2004, in which I mentioned my travails in tracking down the word asteperious (which appears in various spellings). Things pretty much ran aground five years ago, and I never got around to writing about the quest in a proper blog entry (though most of it was documented on the American Dialect Society mailing list). Now would be a good time to tell the story.
