"battle of/ war between the sexes"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> Here's a cliche' missed by Bartlett's and the _Oxford Book of
> Quotations_. (If it's in the _Yale_, my apologies and congratulations to
> Fred.)

A misapprehension that seems to have some currency on this list is that
the Yale Book of Quotations is a dictionary of phrases.  It is not; it is
a dictionary of quotations, with some phrases creeping in because they
originated in quotations or I used the originating context of the phrase
as a quotation (for "greatest happiness of the greatest number," for
example, I use the passage in which Bentham introduced this as a
quotation).

Thus I do not have "war between the sexes" in the YBQ, although I believe
I do have the Thurber title.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE BOOK 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
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