Sense 4b is not that recent--we've now antedated it to 1829 from 1851 ('The account of his second expedition was carefully redacted') (yes, OED is working on RE- words), but it won't come online for a while.
Giles
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From: Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, 9 July, 2009 9:57:33 AM
Subject: Re: appalling, redacted, pulchritude
When and where did this take-over happen? for I've never seen it. To my knowledge redact means to edit, or create, a (literary) formulation, and is very commonly used as such. It isn't necessarily something you do to somebody else's work; if you revise your own poem you redact it. So I find it difficult to know what is being gone on about here.
Actual 4b is a recent shift. It's basic meaning is to create in the sense of putting together. If you censor a text you do of course redact it because it's not the same after as it was before. That doesn't make the two terms equivalent.
There is a class element, because it's a latin word, which attaches it in some people's ears to the idealism of the classicist.
PR
On 9 Jul 2009, at 09:29, John Hall wrote:
Redact, 'To put (matter) into a proper literary form; to work up, arrange, or edit' (OED meaning 4b).
A student taught me this years ago. Useful word before it got taken over to mean 'blank out' (or should that be 'black out'?).
John
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