Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research. Here is the latest round.
Fritz Gheen asked:
Who is the Stuart in Stuart’s Law of Retroaction: It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
I have never heard this associated with a Stuart. It is often attributed to pioneer computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, famous in etymological circles as the pseudo-coiner of the computer “bug.” The earliest I have found it credited to Hopper is in 1984, but “It is easier to get forgiveness than permission” appears earlier in Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law Book Two (1980). Can any of you Google Books / Google News / Newspaperarchive jockeys out there find any versions before 1980?
Nina Gilbert asked:
How and when did the word “awesome” become so trivial and ubiquitous? I wonder if a TV character used it, and then it exploded – first to teenagers, and then to other demographics. OED cites start around 1980, but they’re not first uses. The Official Preppy Handbook, for example, already defines “awesome” as “terrific, great” in 1980.
It is a privilege to respond to the great Nina Gilbert. Nina is a music teacher at The Webb Schools, Claremont, California, and was a stalwart of the late, lamented Stumpers listserve (now continuing in a diminished form as Project Wombat). Nina, Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) had this to say:
The use of _awesome_ as a generalized term of approval is relatively recent … _Awesome_ has been part of the standard hyperbole of sports broadcasting and writing for several years. It may have been popularized by professional football broadcases; when _great_ came to be applied freely to plays and players of average to good quality, _awesome_ was rushed in to supply the idea of being better than average. The use of the word in sportswriting is not quite so recent as you might imagine … Such use is, however, far from limited to the world of sports. Howard 1984 says that preppies favor the word. … we do have evidence of its use in the speech of young people … This use, which appears to be chiefly oral, often attracts the intensifier _totally_.
Webster’s goes on to speculate that the decline in the use of the word _awful_ in its meaning of “inspiring awe” contributed to the use of _awesome_ to mean “inspiring awe,” but that _awesome_ in this sense is now following a similar path to the one _awful_ did a century ago.
Glossolalia Black asked:
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” It is attributed to Plato on this little thing I have up in my office, but I was told by a friend that it wasn’t him.”
Glossolalia, this sounds anachronistic for Plato by almost 2500 years. I haven’t researched it, but I invite the aforementioned Google Books / Google News / Newspaperarchive jockeys to see how far back they can trace this one.
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Sean Penn’s surfer-dude character, Jeff Spicoli, used the word “awesome” to mean “great” in the 1982 movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. I don’t remember if I heard it being used in that manner before then, but due to the popularity of the movie the catchphrase “Awesome! Totally awesome!” exploded overnight among people my age (I was 15 at the time).
agree with the posters’ cultural origins of awesome- as opposed to the nerdy analysis given in the official answer- i would surmise awesome came from surfer slang, which provided much of the new slang in the 80′s when picked up by the near-beach movie industry cited above- and don’t forget valley girl as another great spawn of surfer slang into the mainstream (like totally)
Stephen Goranson has located and verified on paper an earlier citation for the quote about forgiveness and permission. The Reader’s Digest of February 1971 contains a humor section with an anecdote in which a soldier violates rules to obtain drinks for his thirsty comrades. Here is the cite:
Cite: 1971 February, Reader’s Digest, Humor in Uniform, Page 138, Reader’s Digest Association.
“Soldier, don’t you know you are not supposed to be using this vehicle for such a purpose?”
Taking a nervous gulp, the young GI replied, “Yes, sir. But sometimes forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission.”
— Capt. David L. Benton III (Fort Sill, Okla.)
http://books.google.com/books?id=oNMnAQAAIAAJ&q=%22forgiveness+is%22#search_anchor
Could you find the origin of “Those who are not with us, are against us” ?
I know it goes back to at least biblical times, with one Gospel quoting Jesus Christ saying essentially the reverse (“Those who do not oppose us, are with us”), leaving the question “Are modern speakers misquoting Christ, or was He reworking an existing common expression?”
Many people attribute the quote “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” to Mark Twain. I’ve been told recently that it was not him… who then?
@JamesCurran
The gospels include gist of the phrase both ways round:
Matthew 12:30
He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.
Mark 9:39-40
Do not stop him, Jesus said. No-one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me,
for whoever is not against us is for us.
(Quoting New International Version – UK)
Where does the ubiquitous solecism “The problem is is that ….” come from? And when did folks start saying “Absolutely!” when they mean to say “Yes”?
There’s no written record but I remember Captain Hopper (later Admiral) use the phrase at a ACM talk at Virginia Tech in the mid 1970s – probably 74 or 75.