"This pudding has no theme"

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:10 PM +0100 7/18/07, Michael Quinion wrote:
>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".
>
As noted in my last message, the OED itself also has that 1623 cite
for the eating version, and as far as I can tell doesn't have "the
proof is in the pudding" at all.  AHD4 has "the proof of the
pudding", Mike's posited elliptical version.

LH

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