Samuel Bostaph wrote: "Back when I bothered to read the AER, I did get tired of articles that began with an assertion that the article was intended to be "seminal," when what was being presented owed more to Onan than to George Borts" Economists are not known for their modesty. Nonetheless, a quick search on JSTOR, looking at the 20 most recent articles in the AER to use the word "seminal" and, because I don't know when Samuel Bostaph stopped reading the AER, another 10 from 1996, finds not a single one in which an author declares that he or she intends his or her own article to be seminal. In 100 percent of the cases examined, it is a reference to the work of others. And among the cases where I personally knew the papers cited -- sometimes they were far from my own interests, so it is hard to judge -- the papers were genuinely ones that had been the font of substantial further work, suggesting that the cited papers were appropriately described as fruitful ancestors and were not masturbatory dead ends. Kevin Hoover