JESS LAIR QUOTE

[Laurence Horn]

On Sep 13, 2011, at 9:33 PM, Garson O'Toole wrote:

> Fred Shapiro
>> There was some discussion here about the earliest occurrence
>> of a well-known quotation.  I verified it in the privately published
>> first edition of the book in question:
>>
>> If you want something very, very badly, let it go free.  If it comes
>> back to you, it's yours forever.  If it doesn't, it was never yours
>> to begin with.
>> Jess Lair, I Ain't Much Baby -- But I'm All I've Got [page 98,
>> chapter 19] (1969)
>> Note:  This was written by one of Lair's students as part of a class
>> assignment.
>
> Wonderful! Many thanks for your effort in verifying this popular
> quotation in a very early edition. I was one of the people asking
> about whether it existed based on a 1969 copyright notice adjacent to
> the 1972 copyright in a later edition. Later editions included the
> note: "This edition is an expansion of the original book under this
> title." But the date and exact contents of the edition were uncertain.
>
> LH wrote:
>> And then there's the alternate version:  If you want something very,
>> very badly, let it go free. If it comes back to you, it's yours forever.
>> If it doesn't, hunt it down and kill it.
>
> The original source of this variant may be unknown currently. It
> existed by November 1983 on Usenet.
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ADS-L;1f043512.1106D
>
> Garson

How can I be expected to remember an exchange that took place so long ago?  Why, that was from…June 2011, almost three whole months ago!

LH

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