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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 Chesterfield’s alleged remark about sex: ‘The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, the expense damnable’.   The earliest citation so far found dates from 1910 – but without the attribution to Chesterfield.  In fact, it may just have been a saying, known in the 19th century but with the ascription grafted on in the 1920s/30s.

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, Argentina’.  There is an unexplained conjunction between the title line and the inscription (in Spanish) which appears on Eva Perón’s bronze tomb in Recoleta cemetery, Buenos Aires.  That begins with words to the effect, ‘Do not cry for me when I am far away.’  Eva’s body was not returned to Argentina until 1976 and the inscription (of which there is more than one) in Recoleta cemetery bears the date 1982.  Could it have been inspired by the song (which was first performed 1976) rather than the other way round?

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 Ireland.  It is only that the victory is delayed’?  Olivia Manning mentions it in a 1937 novel.

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 UK.

Q1748 Which 1940s / 50s film noir begins: ‘It was hot.  The only kind of hot you can get in L.A. in the summer’?

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 Derby’s butler in October 1952.  Alastair Horne’s Macmillan mentions Churchill’s fascination with this event, as does Martin Gilbert’s Never Despair (pages 770 & 984).

 

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?

 

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