"Chutzpah" classic definition (by Heywood Broun?) (1962)

Fred Shapiro fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Mon Dec 13 12:41:50 UTC 2004


On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

> parents.  The evidence was clear, the crime had been of a most brutal nature, and
> the  parents were shown to have been models of loving care who had made great
> sacrifices for their son's sake. The jury quickly returned a verdict of
> "Guilty." The judge thereupon asked the defendant the usual question: "Have you
> anything to say for yourself before sentence is pronounced?" The young man
> asked  for mercy on the ground that he was an orphan.
>
> "That," said Heywood Broun, "is chutzpah."

This is a recasting of an old joke attested from Artemus Ward (1867) and
in Lincoln lore (1886).  In the specific "chutzpah" form Barry's citation
does improve upon the 1968 Leo Rosten anecdote I used in the Oxford
Dictionary of American Legal Quotations.

Fred Shapiro


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the Ads-l mailing list