Quotes Uncovered
Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently.
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 research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Pointerelle asked:
Who said “A bride is a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her?”
The Yale Book of Quotations has the following:
“Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.” Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic’s Word Book (1906).
Jen asked:
How about “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” It was not Samuel Clemens, as commonly attributed.
The YBQ says:
“Anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the damnable. More than a hundred years ago, somebody asked Quin, ‘Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?’ ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘Last summer.’ I judge he spent his summer in Paris.” Mark Twain, Letter to Lucius Fairchild, April 28, 1880. This letter is the closest source that has been found for the saying, frequently credited to Twain, that “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” The Quin referred to was an 18th-century actor and wit.
Tim Suliman asked:
“Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like the banana.” I’ve always thought it was Groucho, but I’m not sure. Thanks!
The Yale Book of Quotations, which attempts to trace all famous quotations to their accurate sources, has this:
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” Attributed to Groucho Marx in The Essential Groucho, ed. Stefan Kanfer (2000). There is no reason to believe that Groucho actually said this. It appeared in the Usenet news group net.jokes, July 9, 1982.
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
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I would say.
That’s funny.
My mother would respond.
Funny Ha Ha or funny peculiar?
I heard it once in the movie The Scarlet Pimpernel. ( I think the movie was made in the 30′s)
My mother never recalled where she heard it first, other then when she was a girl in Ireland (in the 30′s)
The sentences “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” were never intended as a joke. They were a serious example from early research on computerized language analysis and translation. Note that while the sentence structures are identical, each corresponding word is a different part of speech in the two examples (flies= verb, noun; Like= adverb, verb; Time= noun, Fruit= adjective). It’s an illustration of how difficult it is to assign meaning, without a basis in human common knowledge of the world.
I believe they appeared in an article in Scientific American in the late 1960s.
I believe Groucho said that. I think it’s on the “Evening with Groucho” Carnegie Hall record. I have it, and I even ripped it from the vinyl and I’m still too lazy to check it out.
“this fragile earth, our island home”
I know it is in the current Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church USA. I am wondering if it was quoted from someplace else.
The Time Flies, Fruit Flies quip is used in computer science discussions demonstrating the difficulties of a natural language input in computing.
#3 Penn Jillette:
While I want very much to believe that Groucho did originate the saying, this transcript of the “Evening with Groucho” record does not contain it:
http://www.ibras.dk/comedy/marx.htm
A variation of the ‘Time flies/Fruit flies” remark was used by Douglas Adams in the radio version of _The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy_: Zaphod Beeblebrox is describing a particular spacecraft –
‘That must be one of those Lazlo Lyricon custom jobs — looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow…”
The quote I wish someone could explain to me was one I discovered in a thesaurus in high school, in the section on Vanity. “Overweeming” was one of the synonyms, but there was also the quote “My, how we apples swim!”
I’ve never been able to figure out how that is supposed to represent vanity…. Help?
I thought the fruit flies was used by to purposely disorient people. (Erickson)