reach for the sky

[William Palmer]

Or what's a heaven for?

Bill P

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      reach for the sky
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>
> A Long Island mom on CNN tells her college-bound daughter to "reach for the
> sky."
>
> Now, in my day, that imperative would have been appropriate only if mom had
> been beandishing a six-shooter, maybe two, but in man's intervening march
> from savagery to civilization the phrase has become mainly inspirational.
>
> A GB check reveals three basic usages: applied by gunslingers in horse
> opera, descriptive of things like plants and flames, and
> aspirational/inspirational. OED itemizes the former only.
>
> Early exx. of the latter:
>
> 1929 _Commoneal_ IX  544 [not verified in print]: Shall he take a small and
> sure profit, or reach for the sky?
>
> 1935 _Scribner's Mag._ (XCVII) 116 [not verified in print]: If so,
> Christian
> missions can at least comfort themselves with the thought that once,
> through
> their agency, Christianity was powerful enough to inspire slaves to reach
> for the sky. And that is no mean feat.
>
> The phrase probably got a boost through the title of Paul Brickhill's 1954
> bestseller _Reach for the Sky_, about Douglas Bader, who became a fighter
> ace in the RAF despite having lost both legs in a prewar plane crash. I
> feel
> certain that the self-help phrase has skyrocketed since the '70s. GB
> doesn't
> offers relatively few before Brickhill.
>
> This significantly antedates the OED in the six-shooter context. (OED does
> poorly on the synonymous, monosyllabic "Reach!"):
>
> 1910 William MacLeod Raine _A Texas Ranger_  (N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, 1911)
> 154: "Now, reach for the sky, and prompt, too." ...The deputy disarmed his
> captive.
>
> After Zane Grey, William MacLeod Raine was probably the most successful of
> the pre-1920 authors of pulp westerns. He was an Oberlin graduate.
>
> JL
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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