TANSTAAFL (was: Today's New York Times)

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:56 PM -0500 2/1/01, James A. Landau wrote:
>In a message dated 2/1/01 7:33:51 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU writes:
>
><< My use of JSTOR to find a 1952 occurrence of "There is no such thing as a
>  free lunch" is mentioned, but it should be added that I had previously
>  discovered a 1938 occurrence of this saying using noncomputerized methods. >>
>
>Some useless footnotes:
>
>Robert A. Heinlein in _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ (which appeared in a
>magazine serial during the 1966-67 school year, probably starting in 1966, in
>either _Worlds of IF_ or _Galaxy_ or both) used (endlessly) the abbreviation
>TANSTAAFL for "There is no such thing as a  free lunch".  The characters in
>the novel use "TANSTAAFL" in conversation with no character claiming it as
>his invention, so there is no indication whether Heinlein used an existing
>acronym or coined a new one.

In fact, the acronym must have (and as I recall it did) stood for
"There AIN'T no such thing as a free lunch", or else it would have
been TINSTAAFL.  What we have here is another covert-prestige dialect
borrowing.

larry