Legal advice: pound the facts, the law, the table (variant 1911)

Garson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jul 4 06:32:11 UTC 2010


Thanks to Fred and Victor for responses. ODALQ is beautifully
comprehensive, so I suspected that I was not looking up the right
index terms. The quotation was not listed under pound, hammer, table,
fact, or facts. This is unsurprising because the version in main text
of ODALQ does not contain any of those words. I should have searched
with "Amazon Look Inside" to locate the footnote that contains the
Carl Sandburg phrase "pound on the table".

Garson

On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Legal advice: pound the facts, the law, the table (variant
>              1911)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Note that the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations does have this aphorism (see page 11), although Garson does a characteristically great job of improving upon the earliest use mentioned in the ODALQ.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>

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