"Where is the wisdom?"

[Mark Mandel]

Seen in a sig line:

     Where is the wisdom? Lost in the knowledge.
     Where is the knowledge? Lost in the information.
                                         --T.S. Eliot

     Where is the information? Lost in the data.
     Where is the data? Lost in the %@#$! database!
                                        --Unknown Programmer

Google /"Where is the wisdom? Lost in the knowledge."/ yields about 4,890
results

Skipping "very similar" results, the 42 initial hits all seem to be this
parody or close variations, with the poet's attributed lines in this Q-A-Q-A
form, and most of them add the Unknown Programmer's punchline.  Vicki L.
Browns "Cuute Quotes" <http://www.cfcl.com/vlb/Cuute/Quotes/quotes.txt> in
"Canta Forda Computer Library" attributes the second Q-A-Q-A to "Joe Celko".
It is, in fact the epigraph to Chapter 1 of Celko's
book<http://tinyurl.com/2ano5ch>
*Joe Celko's Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice* (The Morgan Kaufmann
Series in Data Management Systems), Morgan Kaufmann, 1999), where it is
immediately followed by "So I am not the poet that T. S. Eliot is, but he
probably never wrote a computer program in his life."

All 42 initial hits, that is, except for the first:
Wikiquotes<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot>
:

    Where is the Life we have lost in living?
    Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
    Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

-- which attributes it as part of one of the choruses from *The
Rock*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock_%28play%29>,
a pageant play Eliot wrote in 1934.

A gsearch for the correct wording-- /"Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge?"/ -- yields far more rgh, about 95,800. But the folklorelike
Q-A-Q-A form seems apter to chaining (1,2) and parody (2) than the original
form (3):

1  This is the dog that chased the cat that bit the rat that ate the cheese
that lay in the house that Jack built

2  Where is the wisdom? Lost in the knowledge.
   Where is the knowledge? Lost in the information.
   Where is the information? Lost in the data.
   Where is the data? Lost in the %@#$! database!

3 ?Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
   Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
   Where is the information we have lost in data?
   Where is the data we have lost in the %@#$ database?
*       [IMO, not nearly so pithy] *

m a m

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