There’s an old joke running around that goes as follows, “Lost: Bald, one-eyed ginger Tom, crippled in both back legs, recently castrated, answers to the name of ‘Lucky.'” Nigel Rees of The Quote Unquote Newsletter has been tracking down this oft-quoted joke, and so far he’s found it as far back as 1969. On another front, Fred Shapiro of the Yale Book of Quotations has made progress in tracing the origins of famous quotes, often to people other than those who made them famous. And the folks at Quote Investigator are doing their share in researching the history of those quips and aphorisms that do so much to frame our essays and speeches. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “First Use of Famous Quotations”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
Martha, we spend a lot of time, maybe too much time, in our own lives and on the air talking about the origins of words.
Yeah.
Sometimes we get into expressions, maybe idioms, and occasionally we’ll get into something longer than that.
But there is a whole universe of people out there who find the first uses of quotations.
And this is a great, great field. It’s incredibly interesting.
It’s kind of like what you and I do, at least that one little part of our show, but they do it strictly for quotations.
So the kind of stuff that you might say, the Toastmasters speech or the kind of thing that, you know, somebody might lead with at the top of their article to provide some color and comment, you know, that sort of thing.
Well, there’s a newsletter for this and I want to share it with you because I’ve been getting this now for a year.
It’s fantastic.
It’s called the quote unquote newsletter.
It’s published and edited by Nigel Reese.
He’s British, but he deals with all kinds of quotations from all over the English-speaking world.
And just to give you a typical example, there’s a classic joke that he’s been trying to run down
And his readers have been trying to run down, and it goes like this.
There’s a sign about a cat that’s missing, and it says,
Lost, bald, one-eyed ginger tom, crippled in both back legs, recently castrated, answers to the name of Lucky.
And so these fellas have been trying to track down the first time this joke appeared.
And they may have found it as far back as 1969.
They’re still digging.
But so what they’re taking is these jokes and things, not just the jokes,
But the wisdom that passes and the jokes that pass in the form of quotations
And trying to determine who really said that.
Now, as you know, Fred Shapiro in his Yale Book of Quotations has done this at length.
Right. It’s magnificent, isn’t it?
It’s magnificent.
And he was able to overturn many of those quotes that were, you know, people said Mark Twain said it or people said Abraham Lincoln said it.
Or the serenity prayer just a couple of years ago.
That’s right.
Found the first use of it.
And it often turns out that there’s a big difference between the person that we thought said it and the person who actually first said it.
Right.
As we always say, sometimes there’s a popularizer and sometimes the coiner.
And often the two are very different.
In any case, there’s another site I want to share with you.
It’s called thequoteinvestigator.com.
And the quote investigator does the kind of same story.
They find a quotation that people are using and passing around and just try to get to the bottom of it.
Who said it? What did they mean? What was the larger context? Who’s using it now?
Very interesting stuff.
It’s a part of language that’s important to speech making and important to writing
Because a lot of our work is about taking these bits of received wisdom
And trying to plug them into our own thoughts, right, to plug them into our own ideas.
And if you’d like to talk about any aspect of language, this is the place.
Or you can email us words@waywordradio.org.
