new excremental proverb

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The earliest appears to be on Usenet from mid 2005: "Political correctness
> > is based on the principle that it's possible to pick up a turd by the clean
> > end."
> >
> > As of today, 120,000 raw Googlits (I searched under the principal phrase).
> > News travels fast.
>
> Nov. 2002 here:
> http://filesharingtalk.com/vb3/p-updating-photoshop-7-post2197/postcount4

July 2002, expurgated:
http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=123459
"Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional,
illogical, liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous
mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is
entirely possible to pick up a **** by the clean end."

Various sites and forums treat the quote as a more recent creation,
identifying it as "the 2007 winning entry from an annual contest at
Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a
contemporary term."


--Ben Zimmer

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