"yeah, yeah" again (another versions)

[Garson O'Toole]

The Yale Book of Quotations has an earlier cite than Wikipedia. Also,
there does not appear to be an entry in Wikiquote for Morgenbesser.

[Begin excerpt]

Sidney Morgenbesser
U.S. philosopher, 1921–2004

A philosopher of language once presented a formal lecture in which he
announced that a double negative is known to mean a negative in some
languages and a positive in others but that no natural language had
yet been discovered in which a double positive means a negative.
Whereupon professor Sidney Morgenbesser is said to have piped up from
the back of the room with an instant, sarcastic, "Yeah, yeah."

Reported in N.Y. Times Magazine, 14 Aug. 1977

[End excerpt]

Garson


On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "yeah, yeah" again (another versions)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> [from alt.usage.english]
>
> Some time back I heard the following joke:
> --
> A college linguistics professor was discussing double-negatives with his =
> class. He said, "In English, a double-negative creates a positive. In =
> some languages, such as Russian, a double-negative is still a negative. =
> However, in no language does a double-positive make a negative.
>
> A student in the back row called out, "Yeah, right."
>
> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
> One problem with the claim that Morgenbesser's "Yeah, yeah" or "Yeah, =
> right" came during a lecture sometime in the 1950s at Columbia by J. L. =
> Austin is that even though the riposte sounds like Morgenbesser, the =
> original claim doesn't sound like anything Austin would say.  And then =
> again it would be nice to know whether Austin ever gave a lecture at =
> Columbia sometime in the 1950s.  We know what he said at Harvard; those =
> lectures turned into _How To Do Things With Words_, his William James =
> lectures compiled by his students and published in 1962.  We know he =
> lectured at Berkeley during the same period.  But is there evidence he =
> gave a lecture at Columbia in the 1950s, other than his supposedly =
> playing straight man to Morgenbesser?  (Now, of course, the exchange =
> would be up on YouTube the next day and Austin couldn't deny it.)
>
> Some sites on the internet claim that this is in fact a "true urban =
> legend" (i.e. an urban legend that turns out to be true), but the =
> references are all to things like "All of this is somewhat corroborated =
> at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser, with (as far as I =
> can tell) "somewhat" being the operative term.  Do we have a FOAF =
> (friend of a friend) who claims to have witnessed the exchange in =
> person?
>
> It looks like snopes.com used to have an entry on this, but it's been =
> scrubbed away.  Puzzling.
>
> LH=
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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