Swiss exonerate Europe's last executed witch (1782)

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Thu Sep 4 12:31:24 UTC 2008


I take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the editor of
the rare and excellent _Yale Book of Quotations_.

I knew that somewhere I had encountered a slur on the Swiss involving
timepieces. Lo:

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare,
terror, murder, bloodshed---they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da
Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love,
five hundred years of democracy, and peace and what did that produce?
The cuckoo clock."

Harry Lime (1949).

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list