OED in Sunday NY Times Magazine

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 01:21:01PM -0500, George Thompson wrote:
> I noticed in the story that one of the harmless drudges was quoted as
> saying "We're painting the Firth Bridge".   (I'm quoting from memory.)
>
> I see from Proquest's Historical Newspapers a paragraph from the
> Washington Post of March 29, 1936, p. R11, under the headline "Job of
> Painting Bridge At Edinburgh 'Endless'".  "It requires three years for a
> force of 50 painters to work their way from one end of the bridge to the
> other -- and then it's time to begin all over again."

[...]

> I don't see by the Proquest results, from various ways of formulating
> this search, when it became a proverb for "a task that never ends".

Note that OED has an entry for _to paint the Forth Bridge_,
defined as 'used in similative phrases as the type of a
never-ending or arduous task'. We have a bracketed quote from
1901 (apparently NewspaperArchive) discussing the
never-ending-ness of the task, and a quote from 1955 for the
proverb (used, amusingly, to describe the task of updating a
(French) dictionary). It's not clear to me whether ProQuest
was searched for this.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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