Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Nov 12, 2006, at 7:52 AM, Barbara Need wrote:

> It certainly predates 1982, because I remember it from my intro to
> linguistics class at Swarthmore (Spring 1979).
>
> Barbara
>
> Barbara Need
> UChicago
>
>> The Yale Book of Quotations notes that there is no reason to believe
>> that this quotation, often attributed to Groucho Marx, was actually
>> said by him and that it appeared on Usenet on 7/9/1982.  In J.A.
>> Barnes, Models and Inpretations:  Selected Essays 167 (1990), it is
>> cited to Oettinger, The Uses of Computers in Science, Scientific
>> American 215(3):  161 - 72 (1966).

the Oettinger (which needs to be checked out) certainly comes from
the right time period; the quote was a little joke (and object
lesson) among computational linguists in the 60s, illustrating the
pervasiness of ambiguity in ordinary language and the importance of
background knowledge and plausibility in the processing of ordinary
language.  i have no idea who said it first, though.  (Groucho Marx
probably gets nominated because it's the sort of thing he *would*
have said.)

arnold

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