Q: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

Shapiro, Fred fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Thu Jun 3 23:38:42 UTC 2010


I am not clear as to whether anyone has verified the occurrence of this saying in the 1966 Scientific American article.  Does anyone know of the exact wording there?

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of victor steinbok [aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2010 7:44 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Q: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

The SciAm article form 1966 was popular, in the sense that it ended up
being anthologized repeatedly, starting with Freeman's own collections
of articles from SciAm. But, there is also the hit for Harvard Alumni
Bulletin that claims to be 1963, but that's most certainly wrong. It's
either from the late 1960s (should be possible to date from the review
of one of Quine's books), or it's a collection from multiple years,
which is a distinct possibility. If the latter, it is still likely
that the article year is 1966 rather than 1963 because it uses several
other sentences that appear in the SciAm article--and have been used
widely since then (e.g., Thin flies like a thunderstorm, etc.).

VS-)

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