Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana

[Baker, John]

        Does anyone have access to the Scientific American article,
perhaps on JSTOR?  That still seems to be the earliest hard cite we've
come up with and is probably the vector for the quotation's original
popularization.  Of course, the Sci. Am. Article itself may cite to an
earlier source.  I remember reading a discussion of the aphorism in the
mid-1970s, so I knew that the 1982 cite was too late.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Barbara Need
Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2006 10:53 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana

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).
>
>
>John Baker
>
>

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