"There's an old saying..."

[Dan Goncharoff]

Didn't Moltke, der Grosse Schweiger, say this (in German)?

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy".

DanG


On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "There's an old saying..."
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Maybe everyone already knows this but me (Charlie and Garson in
> particular), but people seem to say "There's an old saying...." when what
> they mean is something like, "I heard somebody say this, or something very
> much like it, on one occasion, and it stuck in my mind because it's so
> clever or succinct."
>
> Seeming exmple from CNN the other day: "There's an old saying in the Army:
> 'The first thing to go bad is the plan.'"
>
> Sound like a genuine proverb, right?  However, a Google search yields
> nothing. Of course, I may have overlooked some slight variant that would
> get 10,000 hits, but the principle still seems sound: for most people, it
> only takes one utterance plus a good memory to turn a catchy generalization
> an "old saying."
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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