"take the money and run"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2005, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

> this catchphrase came up in a family discussion last week, which got
> me to wondering when it first gained currency -- before Woody Allen
> used it as the title of his first movie (1969) and Steve Miller used
> it as the title of one of his songs (on the 1976 album Fly Like an
> Eagle).  i don't see it in our archives, and googling gives me piles
> of stuff about the Allen movie and the Miller song and piles of
> relatively recent uses of the expression (at least once referred to
> as an "old adage"), but no account of its history.   has anyone here
> looked at it?

A Newspaperarchive search doesn't turn up a lot of pre-Allen references,
but there are some, enough to indicate that it was a preexisting phrase
that Allen picked up on.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
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   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
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