Who are you and what have you done with...

[Chris F Waigl]

Towse wrote:
> Here's another, earlier than the Googja reference I gave earlier:
>
> HOLD ME! Jules Feiffer. 1977 (p43) [from books.google.com]
>
> "... when I took 500 mg. of diphetocaine which made me alert at
> bedtime when Joey discussed his day at the office -- after which I
> took 750 mg. of osculavenol and slept soundly through the night. This
> morning I work up, dragged myself to the bathroom -- and found that I
> was out of everything. When Joey came down for breakfast he screamed:
> 'Who are you and what have you done with Dorothy?'"
>
>
>

Ah, excellent -- I was looking through Google Books to illustrate
1997/98 "flurry", and there are about 7 or 8 likely examples from
fiction plus one from a work entitled "The other side of pastoral
ministry : using process leadership to transform your church" by Daniel
A. Brown, 1997 ("The worship was flat - I think only the worship team
sang above a whisper. And as I readied to deliver the sermon, only one
thought crossed my mind: Who are you and what have you done with my
congregation?").

All this very much looks like a fashion effect, resurrecting a dormant
catchphrase into a cliché.

Yours is clearly earlier, but not being in North America, I get much
less content back from Google Books returns far less content for me, anyway.

Chris Waigl

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