"Have XXX Will Travel"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Paladin - the Keats-quotin' gunslinger and real popular in his day. Why don't they rerun this series? Too brainy for today's America?

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "Have XXX Will Travel"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 7:47 AM -0800 2/3/05, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Feb 3, 2005, at 6:38 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
>>I can confirm that for many of those in the relevant generation, it
>>was indeed Bob Hope's book title in the mid-1950s that introduced us
>>to the "Have Tux, Will Travel" formula...
>
>on Language Log on 4/25/04, Mark Liberman noted huge numbers of
>versions of this snowclone, but took it back only to tv's Paladin and
>not earlier than that to Bob Hope:
>
>http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000818.html
>

Ah, how quickly we forget. Granted, Paladin/Richard Boone may have a
worthier icon than Bob Hope (I always preferred HGWT to the more
popular Gunsmoke myself), but the "HTWT" slogan was definitely the
model for the template, even for those of us (like me) who never read
the eponymous autobio.

L


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