slight antedating of Benedictine's slogan

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Dec 28 01:58:11 UTC 2009


OK, the "Shaken and Stirred" Times column at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/fashion/27shaken.html
doesn't actually *claim* that some ad hack
working for the monks came up with LWITBR, but it
certainly seems to imply as much:

Shaken & Stirred
500-Year-Old Liqueur Hits the Cocktail Circuit

By JONATHAN MILES
Published: December 24, 2009

BACK in the 1980s, the makers of Bénédictine
liqueur hatched an ad slogan for B&B, which is
Bénédictine bottled with brandy: "Living well is
the best revenge."  Nice point. But as Solomon
Gursky, the lead character in Mordecai Richler's
1989 novel "Solomon Gursky Was Here," countered,
"Living twice, maybe three times, is the best
revenge."  Bénédictine, which celebrates its
500th anniversary in 2010, has done both...

===============
Seems like it might be mentioned that George
Herbert (1593-1633) was fond of the same slogan
some time earlier, even if he himself was born
almost a century after the liqueur.  I think I
first encountered the slogan in the title of a
profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy (and therefore
the Fitzgeralds) that was originally published in
New Yorker in 1962 but anthologized elsewhere and
evidently still available for downloading at
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1962/07/28/1962_07_28_031_TNY_CARDS_000267984

In any case, I think we can take it back beyond
the Benedictine ad campaign or the Richler novel.

LH

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