[Ads-l] "old too soon, wise too late"

Joel Berson berson at ATT.NET
Mon Sep 7 15:51:30 UTC 2015


Isn't it "too soon old, too late wise"?

In Google Web, I'm wrong by almost 3 to 1.  (In GBooks, there are too few hits for either to be meaningful, about a dozen each.)

So, quote detectives -- who said it first, and in which form?  (Confucius?)

Joel

      From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
 Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2015 8:18 PM
 Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Adage: Youth is wasted on the young (George Bernard Shaw variant April 22, 1931)
   
On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 2:38 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com
> wrote:

> As George Bernard once exclaimed, it seems a
> shame to waste it on children.
>

However he expressed it, it's the sad truth: old too soon, wise too late.
;-(

So, before he turned to discovering football talent, Lou Holz  was
discovering Broadway talent. And "comic paper dialect" = "comic-paper
[funny-paper] dialect," no doubt.


-- 
-Wilson
-----
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

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



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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list