New Yorker

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:21 PM -0800 2/14/07, James A. Landau wrote:
>On Tue 02/13/07 at the whiching hour of 12:06 AM Alice Faber
><faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU> quoted:
>
>"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
>
>I cannot figure out how this quote is relevant to the question I
>posed, namely whether The New Yorker magazine provides enough
>circulation for a phrase to make it part of everyday English.
>
>Also I can provide a dubious, sort-of, antedating to this phrase.
>Back around 1993, before the Internet had become the everyday tool
>it now is, there was considerable media speculation over who it was
>who had written the novel "Primary Colors".  My favorite was a
>cartoon showing Chelsea Clinton's cat Socks at a typewriter pounding
>out the typescript of "Primary Colors".
>
Hmmm.  What I cannot figure out is how that Socks cartoon is relevant
to "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" becoming a
catchphrase, any more than would be a cartoon showing 1000 monkeys
typing out Shakespeare's plays.

Does YDOQ (not to be confused with YDOG, the Yale Dictionary of
Growls) have the catchphrase in question, with or without an antedate
to the cartoon caption?

LH

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