"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle"

[Charles C Doyle]

This is the earliest firmly datable instance of the "fish without a tail" conceit that I have been able to find (this from our "Modern Proverbs" file):

A man without a woman is like a fish without a tail.  1909  The saying may represent a collapsing of two lines in an old song, alluded to by W. F. Oliver, "What Have You to Offer," _Wilson's Photographic Magazine_ 46: 178:  "The author of that beautiful ballad, 'A Man without a Woman,' was unquestionably a philosopher.  Let me paraphrase a bit and sing:  An Association without an object / Is like a ship without a sail, / A boat without a rudder, / Or a fish without a tail.”

--Charlie

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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Jonathan Lighter [wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Friday, September 03, 2010 8:46 AM
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If this information has been posted, I apologize:

http://john-s-allen.com/humor/silverdollar.htm

The "1907" date of the song may or not be correct.

JL
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 11:04 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle=
"
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>
> reference to the cited posting by Garson and his next one...
>
> On Sep 2, 2010, at 1:00 PM, Garson O'Toole wrote:
> >
> > Thanks to Bill Mullins and Vic Steinbok for sharing their findings.
> > When investigating the origin of this phrase earlier this year I
> > encountered some other resonant examples containing the word "fish".
> > The expression "fish without a bicycle" may have been constructed as a
> > transformative parody with a gender role reversal from the phrase
> > "fish without a tail". The latter expression has been applied to
> > gender roles since 1859 or earlier. Here are two examples.
> >
> > In 1859 a magazine article asks in its title "What is a Bachelor?" The
> > answer is given in verses that include the following: "a fish without
> > a tail, a ship without a sail; a legless pair of tongs, a fork without
> > its prongs."...
>
> these are fairly straightforward instances of one of the analogical
> proportion frames, X Without Y Is Like W Without Z, conveying =91Y is an
> essential part of or accompaniment to X, just as W is to Z=92 (there are
> several specialized variants, in particular "like a day without sunshine"=
);
> I have a bunch of current examples collected in 2008.
>
> but the Steinem-style examples (who actually originated the
> woman-man-fish-bicycle trope is not my interest here; it does seem pretty
> clear that Steinem served as the point of crystallization) are reverse
> similes, in which W is not an essential accompaniment to Z, implicating t=
hat
> Y is not an essential accompaniment to X, or in which W is an impediment =
to
> Z, implicating that Y should not accompany X.  i got a few recent example=
s
> of these sarcastic versions back in 2008, but none pre-Steinem ("Going to
> war without France is like deer hunting without an accordion"; "A compute=
r
> without Windows is like a dog without bricks tied to its head=94); now it=
's
> nice to see earlier examples with man-God instead of woman-man. (of cours=
e,
> sarcastic versions could be developed at any time on the basis of the
> literal ones, without necessarily deriving from one another.)
>
> the connection to the similar sarcastic analogical trope with "need" --
> what i think of as the Like I Need A Hole In the Head figure -- now seems
> obvious, and it's nice to see some earlier examples  of it.
>
> arnold

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