“QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”
SEARCHING FOR LOST QUOTATIONS
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An important function of the Newsletter – and, indeed, of the radio show – is the tracking down of sources for quotations that have been asked about by readers and listeners. The same research method is applied to the origins and use of phrases and sayings. Since the list was begun in December 1987, there has been something like a 47% clear-up rate – though recently thanks to e-mail, the Internet and some dedicated sleuths – the rate has gone up to 59%. Many people have turned to it as a last resort, having exhausted all other lines of inquiry. But some queries resolutely remain unsolvable – or at least that is how it seems until someone stumbles across the answer, in some cases years after the query was originally posted.
In response to requests from ardent sleuths, I have drawn up a list of what one of them termed the ‘hard core’ of queries that are still giving problems.
If you can supply chapter and verse – and that is what we are after, not
vague surmise – for any of these quotations or phrases, then you may rest
assured that you will put someone out of his or her misery. It is helpful if you can refer to the query
number when providing information about it.
E-mail your information to the addresses given in HOW TO GET IN TOUCH
WITH “QUOTE ... UNQUOTE”. All contributions will be acknowledged
individually. Selected highlights from
the results are printed in the Newsletter.
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Q20 A precise source for the 4th Earl of
Q43 Any pre-1938 use of the phrase, ‘The butler did it!’
Q103 Who wrote: ‘Il mondo in parte disegnar si puole: / Ma pazzo è quel, che dominar lo vuole’?
Q232 An original source for Augustus John’s remark to Nina Hamnet: ‘We have become, Nina, the sort of people our parents warned us about’? Or the identity of the person who quoted it in a British newspaper in 1975-6?
Q247 A source for: ‘Everything’s done in my own little way / My own little tea-set, my own little tray’?
Q376 ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello clouds’ – origin or
citations before the Nigel Molesworth books in the
1950s.
Q416 Georges Feydeau, the French writer of farces (1862-1921), said: ‘In comedy there are only two main parts. He who slaps and he who gets slapped.’ What is the connection, if any, between this remark and He Who Gets Slapped – the English title of the play (1914) by the Russian dramatist Leonid Andreyev?
Q524 Who referred to a woman of generous proportions as being ‘designed to give shade to her young’?
Q572 ‘When there is a great cry that something should be done, you can depend on it that something remarkably silly probably will be done’ – this was once attributed in the Herald Tribune to ‘a great English statesman from the nineteenth century’ – who he?
Q579 Gemma O’Connor once presented a delightful entertainment with the title Ferocious Chastity. This was taken from a remark – ‘the ferocious chastity of Irishwomen’ – reputedly contained in a letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels. But where is it?
Q597 The film of Evita has made me think again of
Tim Rice’s lyrics for the song ‘Don’t Cry for Me,
Q764 ‘Having distributed our guineas [?] to the populace, we drove on to the sound of renewed cheering’ – what is this? I recall someone using it in 1965.
Q788 Was the slogan ‘He’s back – and he’s angry!’ used for a film? Before 1996, that is.
Q862 Precise sources, please, for two widely-quoted sayings of John Ruskin: (1) ‘There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little more cheaply. Those who buy on price alone are this man’s lawful prey’; (2) ‘It is bad to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all; but when you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was b(r)ought to do. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better’?
Q875 Which French sage said: ‘Life works out ... but not as you expect it [La vie s’arrange ... mais autrement]’?
Q899 A source for: ‘It is within the province of all of us to be great or small, according to the degree of service we render, service of one man to another, to a community, to a nation, to all mankind. It is by service we are born, we live, and we are carried to our last resting place. It is therefore not just an obligation, it is the very purpose of life – to serve’ – a British Royal perhaps?
Q914 ‘The trouble with socialism is that it would take up too many evenings’ – Wilde? And, if so, where?
Q955 Did a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising say:
‘Nothing fails in
Q962 ‘Keep alive in our hearts that spirit of adventure which makes men scorn the security of the familiar to wrestle with the challenges of the unknown’ – what is this, a prayer or some other exhortation, presumably quite recent?
Q1368 Where
did the phrase ‘not a happy bunny’ originate?
The earliest example I have so far found is from 1991 in the
Q1748 Which
1940s / 50s film noir begins: ‘It was hot.
The only kind of hot you can get in
Q1976 What is ‘’Arry’s At Was Anging On the Atstand In the All’ – a poem or song? A source, please.
Q2186 Any thoughts on the origin and use of ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’ (first citation found in a 1954 novel) or ‘Trust us, we’re doctors’ (in use by 1993)?
Q2487 Who said: ‘A revolutionary must always have
clean fingernails’?
Q2571 The expression ‘pipe isn’t fooling pussy’ occurs in Alan Bennett’s film An Englishman Abroad (1983). Presumably it refers to sex, but was it an
established coinage?
Q2691 A source, please, for Winston Churchill’s use of the phrase ‘left and
right’ = slang for ‘fight’ (or possibly ‘right and left’ for a couple of
punches)? I believe it was in connection
with the celebrated murder of Lord
Q2800
P.G. Wodehouse more than once uses the
expression ‘sleep poured over me in a healing wave’ – where is this from? ‘Sleep which does something which has slipped
my mind to the something sleeve of care poured over me in a healing wave’ – The
Code of the Woosters, Chap. 14 (1938) – last line
of book; ‘It wasn’t long before sleep poured over me in a healing wave, as the
expression is’ – Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, Chap. 6 (1974).
Q3205 Origin of ‘when hardy comes to hardy’ or ‘when Hardy comes to Hardy’, meaning
the same as ‘when push comes to shove’?
Is it Irish?
Q3534 A source for the anecdote about Lord
Palmerston saying (to Queen Victoria?): ‘Change, change, all this talk about
change. Things are quite bad enough
already!’?
Q3649 Where is this to be found in P.G. Wodehouse: ‘If
it were not for quotations, conversation between gentlemen would consist of an
endless succession of “What hos”’?
Q3670 Did the Duke of Wellington ever say anything like ‘one resourceful man may
do what an army cannot?’
Q3677 A source for ‘Out of my way, peasants!’ – and
usage, perhaps in a film?
Q3737 ‘He ran a pin in Gwendolyn / In Lower Grosvenor Place’ is believed to be
from a comic song of the First World War and Anthony Powell quotes it in A Dance to the Music of Time. It would be good to have a title and text?
Q3742 That LUFTHANSA is an acronym for ‘Let us f---
the hostesses and not say anything’ was reported in an American book and quoted
in Godfrey Smith’s Sunday Times
column some time before 1983. What was
the book and who was the author?
Q3746 Tolstoy is often quoted as having written ‘Whilst there are slaughterhouses
there will be battlefield’ – but where did he say it?
Q3752 Where does the phrase ‘Hordes, Frobisher, hordes’ come from – a sea captain
in a film?
Q3758 Who in particular said, ‘Irony is wasted on the stupid’? Swift has been mentioned.
Q3766 Was it Ben Jonson who said something about everyone who lives in London
being either ‘crow or carrion’?
Q3779 From a Victorian diarist? – ‘ ... had a glance at
a cold chicken and a bottle of claret before retiring to bed.’
Q3856 Did
Byron really write (and if so where?): ‘The most beautiful contact between the
earth and sea took place at the Montenegrin littoral. When the pearls of nature were sown, handfuls
of them were cast on this soil’? And is
there any proof that he called
Q3869 Edward
Lear, the poet and artist, quoted many times: ‘We come no more to the golden
shore where we danced in days of old’.
Where did he get it from?
Posted 23 April 2008
Q3885 In
Kipling’s Stalky & Co. is this: ‘M’Turk
climbed on the railings, where he held forth like the never-wearied rook’ – to
what is this an allusion?
QQ3902 An origin
for this exclamation: ‘May courage abound with cheerfulness and the day end
well’?
Q3914 ‘He
thought Art was the name of the butcher’s errand boy’ may have been written by
a critic in a review of Walter Savage Landor’s poetry. Confirmation, please?
Q3916 ‘The
mistake often made by the young is to assume that the old know what they are
talking about’ has been ascribed to Henry Kissinger. Any firmer attributions?
Q3925 Did
Marcus Aurelius say something to this effect: ‘That which does not constantly
strive to advance will not remain the same, it will inevitably regress’ – and
if so, where?
Q3946 Where did George Cadbury (of the chocolate firm) say that he wanted the
business to be ‘A force for good in a troubled world’?
Q3952 ‘Common sense is nothing but undiagnosed ignorance’ – is this Nietzsche or
somebody?
Q3963 Does anyone
know the origins of the (?) poster poem ‘The Animals of Drink’ – ‘After one
hour he is a monkey / After two hours he is an ass / After three hours he is a
tiger / After four hours he is a sloth ’?
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