[Ads-l] 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall - about flies?

[Jonathan Lighter]

Nice!

JL


On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 9:37 PM ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Impressive work, Peter. Congratulations!
> Garson
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 9:17 PM Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I recently posted an updated history of “99 bottles of beer on the
> wall.”  That song was derived from an earlier song, “99 Blue Bottles
> Hanging on the Wall.”  The significance of the blue bottles or how or why a
> bottle is “hanging on the wall” are not explained in the song, and I had
> not found any smoking gun answering the questions.
> >
> > I speculated that the “blue bottles” could be a blue-bottle fly (like a
> large house fly), or a blue glass hand grenade fire extinguisher.  I shared
> my post here a few days ago.
> >
> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2022-November/162527.html
> >
> > Since then, however, Garson O’Toole alerted me to a single reference
> from 1924, recounting an incident in 1903, in which the writer believed
> that when they sang the song in 1903 they were singing specifically about
> the blue bottle hand grenades.
> >
> > My post here:
> https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2022/11/birds-bottles-and-flies-early-history.html
> ...
> >But no!  Using a new search term (“blue bottle song”) I started looking
> for more
> > support – and instead found support (of > sorts) for my other
> speculation.
> > It turns out that there was an earlier song, “Three Blue Bottles,” which
> was
> > also a backward county song, but in which “blue-bottles” sitting on a
> “mile-stone”
> > fly away one at a time.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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