[Ads-l] Earliest Use of "Live Long and Prosper" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill CIV (US)]

CLASSIFICATION: UNCLASSIFIED


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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Earliest Use of "Live Long and Prosper" (UNCLASSIFIED)
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>> On Feb 18, 2016, at 12:19 PM, Mullins, Bill CIV (US) <william.d.mullins18.civ at MAIL.MIL> wrote:
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>>>
>>> According to my usual W-flavored source for this kind of trivia, 
>>>it

>>> was used in the episode Amok Time, which was written by Theodore 
>>>Sturgeon (a ranking SciFi writer of the fifties and sixties).
>>> 
>>> Geoffrey S. Nathan
>> 
>> Also creator of Sturgeon's Law:  "90% of everything is crap".
>> 
>>  

> This is all quite interesting, but I seem to recall a different genesis, via which 
> it was originally a claim by Edmund Wilson, critically assessing the appeal of 
> popular mystery novels in a put-down called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger 
> Ackroyd?", that 90% of mystery writing (or was it mystery and science fiction 
> writing?  that would make more sense in the light of the anecdote) was crud, 
> crap, or some equipollent and more or less colorful term.  It was then 
> Sturgeon's reply that 90% of ALL writing (or of everything? I don't recall 
> how far the generalization went) was crap.   

> Can anyone else either con- or disconfirm this version? (Of course 
> "Sturgeon's Law" has the same signification on either story, but I prefer mine.)

This
http://www.crazyoik.co.uk/workshop/edmund_wilson_on_crime_fiction.htm

seems to include the Wilson essay, and it while it does disdain detective fiction, it
doesn't have anything about 90% of it being crap.

CLASSIFICATION: UNCLASSIFIED

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