A new use of "duh?"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I have nothing on "No shit, Sherlock [or 'Dick Tracy']" before the mid ' 70s, but they seemed to be well known at the time.  (The same is true for "don't know jack shit.")

  A fellow graduate student told me that "No shit, Sherlock" was often followed by "When did you get the [first] clue ?"  I haven't encountered that again, though.

  JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: A new use of "duh?"
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Wilson Gray wrote:
> The passage of time probably explains everything. No shit (Sherlock) / no
> shit (Shinola) dates to the late '40's - early '50's in speech. That it
> should have precisely the same meaning a half-century later is not to be
> expected.

And later clarified:
> Finally, as soon as I had clicked on "Send," I realized that I had crossed
> "no shit" with "you don't know shit from Shinola" to get the non-occurring
> "No shit, Shinola."

What are the earliest cites we have for "no shit, Sherlock" anyway?
There's just one "Sherlock" cite in the OED3 draft entry for "no shit"
and it's late (1994). And what about the closely related "no shit,
Dick Tracy"? Did the two forms come of age around the same time? I can
find cites for "Dick Tracy" from 1978-79 on Amazon/Google Book Search,
but it shows up in two memoirs recalling the '50s (from c. 1952 in
John Singlaub's _Hazardous Duty_ and from 1957 in Leonard Bird's
_Folding Paper Cranes_).


--Ben Zimmer

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