"brim for a fight" -- I'm done

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 4/18/07, Clai Rice <cxr1086 at louisiana.edu> wrote:
>
> I first heard "stick a fork in him, he's done" in the context of
> baseball (when a pitcher needs to be pulled). A 1932 American Scholar
> [Google Books] has it exactly in this context:
> P. 348 "Stick a fork in him. He's done." The manager waves to the
> bullpen, and a new pitcher begins a long walk into the game.

As usual, Google Books inaccurately dates this serial volume, giving
us instead the earliest year of the serial's publication. (One dead
giveaway is that the useless "snippet" for this search result mentions
1937.) The only way I know to divine the correct date is by doing
trial-and-error searches on year numbers. In this case that helps us
discover that this particular volume starts with Winter 1956-57 (Vol.
26, No. 1).

http://books.google.com/books?id=QJkSAAAAIAAJ


--Ben Zimmer

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