"This pudding has no theme"

[Michael Quinion]

David Bowie wrote:

> From: Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu>
>
> > I suppose we must regard "The proof is in the pudding" as a proverb
> > in its own right; it finds a slightly whopping 297,000 raw Google
> > hits. Google Books shows an 1863 occurrence in a work by Henry
> > Dircks, _Joseph Anstey_ (335). (The date is right for that author).
>
> Cool! I discover that I've been the victim of folk etymology! (Or
> whatever the proverb equivalent of folk etymology is.)
>
> I always thought "The proof is in the pudding" came from the idea that it's
> somewhat difficult to make a really good pudding (not as in flavor, but as
> in absolutely no lumps or trace of graininess)--so the proof of whether
> someone was actually a good cook would be in whether they were able to make
> a good pudding for dessert.

The dating of the evidence suggests that "the proof of the pudding is in
the eating" is much the older form (The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs has
its first explicit example from 1623, though it quotes a text of c1300 to
show the idea was around even earlier), from which "The proof is in the
pudding" has been derived.

The Henry Dircks example would seem to have been a one-off modification of
the older form (access to more than a snippet of the text would make the
context clearer; curse Google Books), since "the proof is in the pudding"
doesn't then reappear in any source I've searched until the 1928 one
mentioned in my earlier message.

The modern form is so obviously derived from the older one that to call it
a proverb in its own right is stretching matters a bit. "The proof is in
the pudding" is surely just a folk-etymologically confused form of an
elliptical version of the original, "(that's) the proof of the pudding".


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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