a baby with a hammer

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Thu Nov 4 20:08:04 UTC 2010


On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1997 C. Fred Alford _What Evil Means to Us_ (Ithaca: Cornell U. P.) 4: A man
> with a method is like a baby with a hammer. Everything looks like a nail. I
> trust I am not this baby, but my method frames the manuscript.
>

How about the variant, "To a man who has a hammer, everything looks
like a nail"? I heard it on some TV drama. I remember it because, at
the time, it struck me as a very lame attempt to portray deep,
Oriental, philosophical thinking of the "Confucius-say" type.

I'd google it myself, but I'm trying to catch up on a multitude of
e-mails and do a wash at the same time. :-)

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list