"it's turtles all they way down"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:47 PM -0500 11/18/06, Stephen Goranson wrote:
>good Yale Book of Quotations quotes Stephen Hawking's 1988 version
>of a story an
>  an audience member objection to an astronomer's cosmological description. A
>lady sareplied that the world rests on a giant tortoise. When challenged on
>what the tortoise stood on, she explained "it's turtles all the way down." YBQ
>adds that this may have been told earlier by Bertrand Russell, which sounds
>reasonable (I think I've encountered that attribution, perhaps in his
>Autobiography?). In any case I guessed it would predate Yertle the Turtle (one
>of the first books I could read, all by myself). Google book gives, e.g.:

Later than those below, but earlier than Hawking, is the extended
version of the anecdote told in the front matter of Haj Ross's 1967
celebrated MIT dissertation, which was the first exposure to the
"turtles all the way down" for a lot of us linguists of a certain
age.  It's really very well told there, FWIW; I'm sure Haj himself
(<HAJ at PO7.CAS.UNT.EDU>) would be happy to reveal his sources.

LH

>1902 As, in the old Hindu account of how the world was
>supported....the elephant
>on a tortoise....[when challenged] he sought to save himself in this
>quandry by
>roundly asserting that it was "tortoise all the way down"
>The New World and the New Thought, J. T. Bixby
>
>1908 p. 563, Princeton Theological Review: "rocks all the way down"
>
>Stephen Goranson
>http://www.duke.edu/~goranson
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org