"take the money and run"

Arnold M. Zwicky zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Wed Dec 28 16:49:31 UTC 2005


this catchphrase came up in a family discussion last week, which got
me to wondering when it first gained currency -- before Woody Allen
used it as the title of his first movie (1969) and Steve Miller used
it as the title of one of his songs (on the 1976 album Fly Like an
Eagle).  i don't see it in our archives, and googling gives me piles
of stuff about the Allen movie and the Miller song and piles of
relatively recent uses of the expression (at least once referred to
as an "old adage"), but no account of its history.   has anyone here
looked at it?

arnold



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