Assorted Comments -- Slums

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed May 23 20:30:35 UTC 2007


At 4:09 PM -0400 5/23/07, Fred Shapiro wrote:
>On Wed, 23 May 2007, Doug Harris wrote:
>
>>"Nobody goes there anymore; It's too crowded."
>>yogi
>
>This is not really a Yogiism, according to the stupendously thorough Yale
>Book of Quotations:
>
>They were talking about a certain hangout and Johnny said, "Nobody goes
>there anymore.  It's too crowded."
>        John McNulty, New Yorker, 10 Feb. 1943.  Often erroneously
>attibuted to Yogi Berra.

interesting; but who's the "Johnny"?  (I assume from the way the
quote appears that it's not John McNulty himself, unless he was
pulling a Bob Dole avant la lettre.)

>An earlier version, attributed to a
>"flutterbrained cutie named Suzanne Ridgeway," appeared in the Helena
>Independent, 10 Sept. 1941 ("Now I know why nobody ever comes here; it's
>too crowded").
>
As opposed to that better-known flutterbrained cutie, Lawrence Peter
Berra himself.

LH

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