query for phrase finders

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

LH: Here's a close match in English in 1896.

Date: June 1896
Journal: The Eclectic Medical Gleaner
Volume 7, Number 6
Article: Spermatorrhoea
Start Page 150
Quote Page 151

http://books.google.com/books?id=eGIDAAAAYAAJ&q=%22an+erect%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
The young man needs all the moral bracing he can get, and with all
that, enough of them go to the devil by the "wine-women" route. An
erect penis has no conscience—It should be kept under control, not
given its own head. Shame on the man who will suffer himself to be
victimized by his sexual passion. He deserves what he will get in the
end—hell
[End excerpt]


On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 8:20 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      query for phrase finders
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> "A stiff prick has no conscience."
>
> I haven't been able to trace this one by searching in YBOQ or online sites, in most of which it doesn't appear at all. It does show up in profusion on the web, attributed or "attributed" variously (and in some cases I assume jocularly) to Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Don Iovino, Thomas Jefferson, Confucius, and F. E. L. Bell of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, among others, but often just shows up as "popular wisdom", "a World War II saying", "an ancient truism", an espied graffito, etc. No Twain or Lincoln this time.  No doubt the line appears in Miller's Tropic of Capricorn (and maybe of Cancer too), and quite possibly in Mailer, but I suspect the truism had already been around for awhile by then, and probably well before the World War II dates. I think I may have even once come across its German equivalent (in Freud?).  In any someone must have said it/written it first; perhaps it appears with slightly different wording or syntax.  Anyone know?
>
> LH
>
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