Quote: lead a whore to culture (antedating Dorothy Parker 1962 July) (Folklore 1963 March)

[Jonathan Lighter]

The Indiana University Folklore Archive is (or was) a repository for
undergraduate folklore collections turned in as assignments in classes on
folklore. (I did some research there many years ago.)

All items in the archive were dated by the student collectors to the time
when they collected them, usually during the same semester that the
collection was turned in. (Of course that date appeared too, IIRC.)

My guess is that the date of the items' collection was between ca1957 and
1963, as the Archive was started by Richard M. Dorson while he was head of
the Folklore Department beginning in 1957.

JL
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:01 PM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Quote: lead a whore to culture (antedating Dorothy Parker
> 1962
>              July) (Folklore 1963 March)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Challenge antedate 1968:
> Dorothy Parker: You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her
> think.
>
> I located an attribution to Dorothy Parker in 1962. I also found an
> article in the Journal of American Folklore in 1963 indicating that
> the pun whore-to-culture / horticulture is the punch line of a more
> elaborate joke. (Note the word "horticulture" does not appear in the
> text of the joke given further below). This article points to the
> "Indiana University Folklore Archive" as the location of the corpus
> containing the joke. Maybe some list member knows about this archive
> and its dating scheme(s).
>
> The third citation presents an alternative story about Dorothy Parker
> and the word horticulture. She uses the word in a verbal game of wits
> with different rules.
>
> Cite: 1962 July, Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts, "High Spirits in the
> Twenties" by John Mason Brown, Page 38, Column 1, Volume IV, Number 6.
> (Google Books snippet view; Verified on paper)
>
> Frank Adams's solving the problem of building a sentence around
> "meretricious" with "Meretricious 'n' a Happy New Year," and Mrs.
> Parker's solving the same problem with "horticulture" by coming up
> with "You may lead a whore to culture but you can't make her
> think"葉hese and a hundred others of their kind may by now have become
> enfeebled by familiarity.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=dd8GAQAAIAAJ&q=horticulture#search_anchor
>
>
> Below is a 1963 article in which Jan Harold Brunvand proposes a
> classification scheme for "Shaggy Dog Stories". The joke being traced
> falls into class C: Stories with Punning Punch Lines.
>
> The story has the annotation "IU 3" and page 46 of the article
> indicates that "IU" refers to the Indiana University Folklore
> Archives.
>
> Cite: 1963 January-March, Journal of American Folklore, "A
> Classification for Shaggy Dog Stories" by Jan Harold Brunvand, Page
> 60, Volume 76, Number 299, Published for the American Folklore Society
> by Houghton, Mifflin and Co. (Google Books snippet view; Verified in
> microfilm)
>
> C35. You Can't Lead a Whore. A man offers to show a beautiful girl he
> has met his rare flower which he keeps in his bed. She thinks she is
> being seduced and leaves when she sees that there really is a flower
> in the bed. The moral: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't
> lead a whore-to-culture." (Or "You can lead a whore-to-culture, but
> you can't make her think.") -IU 3.
>
> (Errors likely in retyping)
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=ytsMAAAAIAAJ&q=whore#search_anchor
>
>
> A different story about Dorothy Parker and the word horticulture
> appears in the Los Angeles Times in 1976. The date 1976 is rather
> late, but this story is told by the playwright Marc Connelly who did
> attend the Algonquin Round Table. The more common story about
> horticulture is also repeated in the article.
>
> Cite: 1976 May 4, Los Angeles Times "Reminiscences of the Algonquin"
> by Dave Smith, Page F1, Los Angeles, California. (ProQuest Historical
> Newspapers)
>
> Connelly recalled the endless word games in which a difficult word was
> thrown at a player, who had to respond quickly by using it in a
> sentence, or in which a situation was outlined to a player, who had to
> sum up the situation in one word.
>
> Two of Mrs. Parker's: Given the word "paroxysm," she thought a moment
> and then said, "Paroxysm agnificent city." Given the description of a
> prostitute who refused to go out with two men one night because she
> was leaving for Vassar the next day, Mrs. Parker responded with
> "horticulture."
>
> (Another legend, not recounted Sunday night, has Mrs. Parker being
> given "horticulture" to put into a sentence. She retorted instantly.
> "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.")
>
> Garson
>
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