"outside of a dog"

[Joel S. Berson]

"Don't mess with the ALA"?  Maybe it has a pipeline to hit men.

Joel

At 6/14/2010 05:07 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>Mark,
>
>You can tell your wife that I am a librarian and also know a little
>bit about quotations.  I don't believe the ALA has any special
>concern for accurate quotation sources more than anyone else, and in
>fact the "outside of a dog" quote is the proof of that, since they
>clearly embraced it without any concern about its authenticity.
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
>Mark Mandel [thnidu at GMAIL.COM]
>Sent: Monday, June 14, 2010 3:31 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: "outside of a dog"
>
>I forwarded this (with Garson's link) to my wife, a retired librarian. She
>replies:
>
>Objects produced for sale by the American Library Association attribute the
> > remark to Groucho Marx. I wouldn't mess with the ALA when it comes to
> > citations.
> >
>
>Which may mean they know something we haven't come up with, or that they're
>not immune to pop attribution, or that it doesn't matter to them in this
>case.
>
>Do any of the Groucho attributions offer checkable citations? By 1954
>Groucho was sixty and his career was largely over. (
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx)
>
>m a m
>
>On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 11:35 PM, Baker, John M. <JMB at stradley.com> wrote:
>
>Google Books has an earlier example of this, in full text, from Boys' Life,
> > p. 78 (Feb. 1954).  It's on the magazine's Think and Grin page, which
> > appears to be a collection of jokes sent in by readers (though I
> don't see a
> > specific invitation to readers to contribute).  The quip is in more or less
> > the canonical form:
> >
> >     A book is man's best friend outside of a dog, and inside of a dog it's
> > too dark to read.--_Jim Brewer, Cleveland, O._
> >
> > If, as I suppose, this was submitted by one of the magazine's juvenile
> > readers (presumably Jim Brewer of Cleveland), then it is likely that he
> > heard it elsewhere, rather than making it up.  Be that as it may,
> Boys' Life
> > had a large circulation and is a plausible avenue for the phrase's initial
> > popularization.
> >
> > John Baker
> >
> >
> >> ________________________________
> >>
> >> From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Arnold Zwicky
> >> Sent: Sun 6/13/2010 10:47 PM
> >> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> >> Subject: "outside of a dog"
> >>
> >> with citation of ADS-L, at the end of this posting on my blog:
> >>
> >> http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/the-commencement-pun-crop/
> >>
> >>
> >>
>
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>
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