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A shocked reader sent us a link to this Los Angeles Times article, adding the following:

Dubai has already swept up a trophy case of titles packed the heftiest box of chocolate bars (Kit Kat), cooked the largest bowl of spaghetti, gathered the biggest group of people of the same name (Mohammed, natch).
I've never seen that in a newspaper. Never.

Neither had we, that we could remember. A LexisNexis search found only two previous examples, the earliest being a June review of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (natch).

Now we were curious. What about the Newspaper of Record? Had "natch" infected the staid, gray pages of the New York Times? Surprisingly, yes. 76 times. The earliest citation comes on December 19, 1982, in an AP story about the journals of a man dying alone in the woods. It simply must be quoted:

He added a separate note asking that his personal items be returned to his father, and he said that the person who found him should keep his rifle and shotgun. He signed his name and attached his Alaska driver's license. "The I.D. is me, natch," he said in the diary's last entry.

Brings a tear to your eye, don't it? The first non-quoted use comes from, oddly enough, the Financial desk, and it's not until December 6, 1989, ushering in a decade chock-full of natches. Special bonus trivia: H.L. Mencken reported that the word "natch" was "as pass as a yearling egg" back in 1947. But as we're sure you remember, the '90s were all about '40s nostalgia.

In Dubai, the Sky's No Limit [LAT]