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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What about “the whole nine yards?” The article on wikipedia regarding it was inconclusive.
4: I think Plato was a wrestler. Maybe he came up with that quote.
Wait, I’m confused. The quote in the readers question is “You can’t make your cake and eat it too.” Did I misread something? That doesn’t make sense. It misses the whole point of the cliche. It’s the having that’s important, not the making; in fact you CAN make your cake and eat it too!
Am I missing something?
How about “Quit Smoking Cold Turkey” ?
A very strange one..
The big confusion with the cake one was that it’s not “make” but “have”, and indeed once you’ve eaten the cake it’s gone, so you can’t have it anymore.
I’d like to know where the terms “off/on the wagon” came from. This to me is just bizarre, and I’m never even sure which one is the good one, off or on? Saying the wagon is alcoholism and I want to be off it makes as much sense as saying falling off means slipping up and having a drink.
My Canadian girlfriend is mystified by my use of the phrase, “Them’s the breaks.” At first she thought I was just strange until noticing that it often appears in US television shows and movies as well. Having no idea that a Canadian would find such a common expression so odd, I’ve now started to wonder where it came from and why so many people say this grammatically troubled expression.
Another one that gets her is when in need of a favor, I ask her to, “Do me a solid.”
In honor of the protests over the election in Iran, I was wondering about the expression, “Its not the vote that counts, its who counts the votes.”
I’ve often heard it attributed to Stalin, but I’m not sure if I believe that.
The cake thing makes so much sense now! It’s commonly recited as, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” which sounds like, you can’t possess a piece of cake and then eat it, which, of course, makes zero sense. Once you possess it, you’re in the perfect position to eat it.
Reversing the quote back to the original, “You can’t eat your cake and have it still,” meaning you can’t eat up your slice of cake and then, afterwards, still have a slice of cake sitting around, makes perfect sense!
Thanks!