[Ads-l] Quote verification

[Ben Zimmer]

This Slate piece is the best investigation into what the heck Biden might
have been thinking when he said that. He may have been conflating a line in
the 1952 Tyrone Power movie "Pony Soldier" ("The pony soldier speaks with a
tongue of the snake that rattles") with a line in the 1949 John Wayne movie
"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" ("So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers...").

https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/joe-biden-dog-faced-pony-soldier-john-wayne-tyrone-power.html

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 8:37 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah played a clip of Biden at a campaign stop
> being asked by a student in the audience how he was going to win nationally
> if he had done so poorly in Iowa, and he responded by asking the questioner
> if she had ever participated in a caucus.  When she said she had, he
> responded by calling her “a lying dog-faced pony soldier”, an unusual way
> to go after undecided voters. Biden’s team was later asked later to clarify
> the remark, which Noah described as “strong words…that I don’t really
> understand at all” (although he provided some vivid images of possible
> referents; see https://tinyurl.com/t4yg7mv starting at 4:15). Biden's
> campaign later claimed it was a quote from a John Wayne movie, but nobody
> has been able to identify the movie.  There are others.)
>
>

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