A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent researches by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Quotes Uncovered
Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently.
Marc Anthony asked:
“You can’t make your cake and eat it too,” refers to having everything work your way. Please research. This is a ridiculously clichéd quote. I made the cake. I will eat the cake.
In last week’s posting I completely screwed this one up, responding about an entirely different “cake” quotation (“Let them eat cake”). The Yale Book of Quotations, which attempts to trace all famous quotations to their accurate origins, has the following for the other “cake” quote:
“A man cannot eat his cake and haue it stil.” John Davies, Scourge of Folly (1611). The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs quotes an earlier version: “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” (John Heywood, Dialogue of Proverbs [1546]).
tschlossberg asked:
Can you find the origin of the phrase “Close, but no cigar”? Not only do I not know where it comes from, but I have never really been able to figure out what it means.
I actually wrote about this in Cigar Aficionado Magazine:
“Close, but no cigar” is widely used to signal a near miss. The earliest instance of its use anyone has found is in the 1935 film Annie Oakley, which has the line “Close, Colonel, but no cigar!” Why a cigar? The reference appears to be to a carnival game of strength (the “Highball” or “Hi-Striker”) in which the contestant hits a lever with a sledgehammer to try to drive a weight high enough up a column to ring a bell at the top. The standard reward for ringing the bell is a cigar.
K said:
The Google project to digitize all books may produce a revolution in tracing quotes.
Yes, Google Books, along with other databases such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers and Newspaperarchive, has already produced such a revolution — it’s called The Yale Book of Quotations! The YBQ uses a wide range of online historical text collections to push quotation origins much further back than other reference works, such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, do. For example, the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs traces “Justice delayed is justice denied” back to 1999, but The Yale Book of Quotations demonstrates by using historical databases that it was introduced by William E. Gladstone in a Parliamentary speech in 1868.
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
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My mom always uses the “you can’t have your cake” line. My friends once guessed it meant you cant enjoy your cake, which you just made, aesthetically, and eat it too. Makes sense, no?
I don’t have the exact quotation, but it goes kinda like this: “the intelligence of a group is limited by the intelligence of the its dumbest member”.
I have used all the internet resources I know to try to trace the origin of “it’s a jungle out there” without success. Any help would be appreciated.
‘I swear by Zeus that an outstanding runner cannot be the equal of an average wreslter’
Commonly attributed to Socrates, though this seems unlikely for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which is that I have yet to see an actual source text for it!
The cake one seems very logical…cakes are part decoration, part food. Once it’s done, you ‘have’ your cake. If you start eating it, you no longer ‘have’ it. You can’t have it both ways. I’ve always wondered where the term, ‘getting off the schneid’ came from (example – used in sports reporting to denote someone recovering from a winless streak)
When and why did peole start “taking things with a grain of salt?” Why just a grain???
My high school English teacher repeatedly said the following, which she claimed to be a quote by Jonathan Edwards, the revivalist preacher, but I cannot trace it anywhere:
“Man has the power to do anything that he wills. He has no power to will it.”
As Matt said, once you’ve eaten the cake, you don’t have it any more. Perhaps an economics example might be more apt: you can’t have a pile of money and all the toys you can buy with that pile of money, too.
If possible, please give me the origin of the quotation, “I will not live in fear.”