The twelfth of never

[Jonathan Lighter]

My wife made me quit dating, so I'm not that kind of colleague.  But I do know that "the twelfth of never" is not a phrase in "The Riddle Song," as it's often called.  AFAIK, the phrase originated in the pop song.

  I have a friend who uses it relatively frequently, and he concurs.

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: The twelfth of never
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The tune perhaps did. There's a folksong with the line, among others,
"I gave my love a chicken without any bone," a line that I remember
because of the double-entendre. However, I can't remember whether the
folksong contains the phrase, "twelfth of never."

OTOH, I could have it bass-ackwards, since I heard the pop song a
couple of years or more before I heard the folksong. I.e., the
supposed folksong could very well be based on the pop song and not the
other way around, for all that I know.

BTW, I appreciate your use of "dating colleagues" instead of the more
accurate, in my case, at least, "_dated_ colleagues." ;-)

-Wilson

On 9/21/06, Joanne M. Despres wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Joanne M. Despres"
> Subject: The twelfth of never
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To my dating colleagues: would any of you happen to know
> whether the phrase "the twelfth of never" (a poeticism for "never")
> preceded the song recorded by Johnny Mathis in 1957?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joanne
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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