"Murphy's Law" (1955)

[Mark A. Mandel]

Wilson writes hopefully*:
   >>>>>

Mark, please tell me that you didn't have to look it up! You simply
pulled it out of your ass, right? And you're merely supplying a cite
for my edification, right? ;-)
 <<<<<

* (Not a sentence adverb, for once.)

Half-and-half. I knew that Burns had written "aft", and I wanted to be sure
I was getting it right. So, naturally, being lazy, I Googled "Robert Burns"
rather than rolling my chair a foot to the left and grabbing the ODQ (is
that a standard abbreviation? It's familyspeak for the Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations), second edition, before they took out half of the classical
stuff. Well, getting it off the Web also let me copy and paste rather than
trying to type the quotation (hard on the wrists) or dictate it (possible
for the speech recognition, in spelling mode, but not worth it).

-- Mark
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]