[Ads-l] Earliest Use of "Live Long and Prosper" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Laurence Horn]

> On Feb 18, 2016, at 2:15 PM, Mullins, Bill CIV (US) <william.d.mullins18.civ at MAIL.MIL> wrote:
> 
> CLASSIFICATION: UNCLASSIFIED
> 
> 
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> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Earliest Use of "Live Long and Prosper" (UNCLASSIFIED)
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> 
>>> On Feb 18, 2016, at 12:19 PM, Mullins, Bill CIV (US) <william.d.mullins18.civ at MAIL.MIL> wrote:
> -----
>>>> 
>>>> According to my usual W-flavored source for this kind of trivia, 
>>>> it
> 
>>>> was used in the episode Amok Time, which was written by Theodore 
>>>> Sturgeon (a ranking SciFi writer of the fifties and sixties).
>>>> 
>>>> Geoffrey S. Nathan
>>> 
>>> Also creator of Sturgeon's Law:  "90% of everything is crap".
>>> 
>>> 
> 
>> This is all quite interesting, but I seem to recall a different genesis, via which 
>> it was originally a claim by Edmund Wilson, critically assessing the appeal of 
>> popular mystery novels in a put-down called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger 
>> Ackroyd?", that 90% of mystery writing (or was it mystery and science fiction 
>> writing?  that would make more sense in the light of the anecdote) was crud, 
>> crap, or some equipollent and more or less colorful term.  It was then 
>> Sturgeon's reply that 90% of ALL writing (or of everything? I don't recall 
>> how far the generalization went) was crap.   
> 
>> Can anyone else either con- or disconfirm this version? (Of course 
>> "Sturgeon's Law" has the same signification on either story, but I prefer mine.)
> 
> This
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.crazyoik.co.uk_workshop_edmund-5Fwilson-5Fon-5Fcrime-5Ffiction.htm&d=AwIFAg&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=_zP-leKatI05W3qqx14HI8me3WVFOJOrOWTSUvLFFO8&s=uk2sXonFR_5sUQ3DiF_Dfh_gCbeMkbQCvFW1QiXzstY&e= 
> 
> seems to include the Wilson essay, and it while it does disdain detective fiction, it
> doesn't have anything about 90% of it being crap.
> 

The Sturgeon version seems itself to come in two flavors, those of "crap" and "crud".  The 1958 version from _Venture_, as quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law, includes both wordings, and cites a remark of his along the same lines made "about 1951" in a talk at NYU.  (Curiously, there was no wikipedia entry on Sturgeon's Law to consult when I wrote the above in 1999.  Talk about cultural progress!)

LH

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