"bottle in front of me" (close, but no cigar)

[George Thompson]

Here is the idea of the champagne/sham pain quibble, but they somehow piss it:

        A good natured looking little black fellow named Charles Odell, with his hair braided into as many tails as a Bashaw. . . .  [a clerk; is arrested for stealing a bottle of champagne from his boss, and so suffers] the real pain of imprisonment.  New-York Daily Advertiser, November 18, 1834, p. 2, col. 3

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2008 5:40 pm
Subject: Re: YBQ in WSJ / "bottle in front of me" (UNCLASSIFIED)
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU


> On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 5:26 PM, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 4:36 PM, Laurence Horn
> <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> The version attributed to Tom Waits (1977), "Champagne for my real
> >> friends, real pain for my sham friends," was familiar to me as a
> >> toast a decade earlier.  I have no idea whence it came, but I
> >> wouldn't be surprised to learn it had another couple of decades on
> it.
> >
> > And then some!
> >
> > 1905 _New York Times_ 15 May 6/2 On moving away one of five small brass
> tablets
> > that hung on this wall and on which were engraved little bon mots
> such as
> "Real
> > pain for our sham friends and champagne for our real friends."
>
> And here it is from 1876, in an article that traces it all the way
> back to the
> Battle of Lake Erie in 1813 (quoting Mr. John Norris, the last remaining
> survivor):
>
> 1876 _Potter's American Monthly_ Feb. 88/2 At a supper that was given
> on their
> return to Kentucky, just after the battle, the phrase, "Here's
> champagne to our
> real friends and real pain to our sham friends," was then for the
> first time
> made use of.
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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