"little green men" / "take me to your leader" origin?

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks, Fred.

JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: Re: "little green men" / "take me to your leader" origin?
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On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> Can anyone establish an early date for "little green men"? OED no have.
> I suspect it comes from the pulp sf days of the interwar period, because
> I've never heard of a UFO case that seriously reported "little green
> men" hopping from a landed saucer.

There has been a lot of research into this, and I believe the OED science
fiction site has citations back to 1949, as well as a literal usage by
Rudyard Kipling in 1906.

> Another query: Was there originally a cartoon or something with the
> stereotypical alien demand, "Take me to your leader ?"

Yes, the forthcoming Yale Dictionary of Quotations traces this to a 1953
cartoon. There is also at least one non-science fiction usage before
this.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press,
Yale Law School forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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