[Ads-l] Not something to lose sleep over, but...

[Jonathan Lighter]

If "A lion doesn't lose sleep over opinion of sheep," the Nietzschean
speaker is already using the phrase "lose sleep over," and the proverb's
importance to the query heads toward zero.

Sometimes the uberbeast is said to be a tiger or a wolf. The Net seems to
cough up no exx. of any version before 2013, more than a century (I'd say)
after the basic anti-insomniac idiom became established.

JL

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 3:43 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:      Re: Not something to lose sleep over, but...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > On Jun 30, 2015, at 3:19 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >=20
> > On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 2:47 PM, Laurence Horn =
> <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> > wrote:
> >=20
> >> Am I right in assuming there's less here than meets the eye?
> >=20
> >=20
> > That's my immediate opinion, too. When stuff keeps you up at night, =
> that's
> > literally what it does. There's nothing metaphoric about it.
> > --=20
> > -Wilson
>
> Agreed.  But somehow, when I read the thesis that 'the phrase "lose =
> sleep over" [perhaps] comes from "Lion doesn't lose sleep over opinion =
> of sheep."', all I can think of is a combo platter of=20
> of Wimoweh's "In the jungle/The mighty jungle/The lion sleeps tonight" =
> and Woody Allen's "The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb =
> won't get much sleep".
>
> LH
> =20
> > -----
> > All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint =
> to
> > come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> > -Mark Twain
> >=20
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"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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