Aeschylus, G.B. Shaw at it again

[victor steinbok]

Heinlein sounds right for the exact quote (although he wrote "Never
/attempt/ to teach a pig..."), as it shows up in "Time Enough for
Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long" (1973, p. 51 in the hardcover).

By 1981, the quote was popular enough to show up on T-shirts
advertised in a bunch of magazines, although I only found them in
Mother Jones from 1982. Al Kooper wore the shirt on the cover of his
Championship Wrestling album. It also shows up on posters and "sign[s]
behind the desk" through the late 1970s and 1980s. I doubt Kooper was
a vector--the T-shirts likely were more popular than the record. The
MIT Science Fiction society used to sell them for fund-raising,
although I can't pin it down other than between 1983 and 1986. One of
my classmates used to wear one.

I picked up the "19th century" line from one of the posts concerning
both pig quotes that claimed to have looked into it. It seems to be
inaccurate for the exact formulation. But there is an 1877 precursor:

http://goo.gl/XgvKW
Punch. Volume 72. July 7, 1877
Diary of My Ride to Khiva. p. 309/1
> Slight jealousy between the Learned Pig and the Musical Mouse. Whenever the Pig begins to practise with his letters (as he has to do every day), the Musical Mouse begins to whistle and sing, just to put him out, and make him wild. This annoys the Pig, who spells things wrong, and doesn't answer questions properly. Consequently, I am obliged to beat the Pig. Whereupon he grunts piteously, and spells out, "Cuss that Mouse I" If I could only smooth matters over, and bring them together, it would be a fortune!

The piece is signed "Theophilus Queer", but it was republished the
same year, as a separate volume, by F.C. Burnand. http://goo.gl/ZQ9nm

There might be some underlying "teach a pig to sing" expression
bubbling up before Heinlein, although I found little evidence of it.
The only GB hit:

http://goo.gl/0RUpL
The Pacdific Printer. Volume 15:1. January 1916
Printers' Troubles and the Remedies. p. 24
> "The statement is very often made that 'what printers need is education.' This is unquestionably true, and it is a pretty safe bet that you are one of the printers who need it most.
> "It is about as easy to 'educate' a printer as it would be to teach a pig to sing the Star Spangled Banner at feeding time.

VS-)

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Fred means the one about teaching a pig to sing.
>
> JL
>
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> The "pig" quote is in the Yale Book of Quotations, under Robert A.
>> Heinlein.
>>
>> Fred Shapiro

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