[Ads-l] Quote: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Request help accessing Harvard Alumni Bulletin in 1963

Wed Oct 11 16:59:55 UTC 2023

Back on September 23, 2023 I requested help to access a periodical,
and Dave Wilton kindly responded. Now the Quote Investigator article
about the quotation in the subject line has been updated.

Details about the citation in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin are
available in the QI article.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/

[Begin acknowledgements]
Many thanks to David Wilton and the Firestone Library of Princeton
University for providing scans of the crucial 1963 article in the
"Harvard Alumni Bulletin". Also, thanks to Bill Mullins for pointing
to "Fortune" magazine. Additional thanks to Ben Zimmer who pointed to
the "AFIPS" citation and other citations. Further thanks to mailing
list discussants John Baker, Barbara Need, Arnold Zwicky, Barry Popik,
Douglas Wilson, Ron Butters, Joel S. Berson. Laurence Horn, Victor
Steinbok, Margaret Lee, Damien Hall,  David Daniel, Fred Shapiro, Seán
Fitzpatrick. Lastly, thanks to the volunteer editors of Wikipedia who
pointed to the "Boys' Life" citation.
[End acknowledgements]

Below are some precursor citations.

In 1690 the simile about time appeared in a religious book titled "The
Pleasure of the Mind; Or, the Foretast of Happiness":

[ref] 1690, The Pleasure of the Mind; Or, the Foretast of Happiness.
Section: To Show the Dextrious Excellency of our Religion, Christian,
upon St. John, Chap. 8. Ver. 34, Start Page 233, Quote Page 236,
Printed, Sold by Randal Taylor, near Stationers-Hall, London. (Google
Books Full View) link [/ref]

https://books.google.com/books?id=sYVnAAAAcAAJ&q=+%22time+flies%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
... for the time flies away as swift as a Bird of the Air, or as an
Arrow out of a Bow.
[End excerpt]

In 1816 the precise expression "Time flies like an arrow" appeared in
"The Infidel's Text-Book, Being the Substance of Thirteen Lectures on
the Bible" by Robert Cooper who described the following statement as a
Chinese proverb:

[ref] 1816, The Infidel's Text-Book, Being the Substance of Thirteen
Lectures on the Bible by Robert Cooper, Lecture 13: Morality Without
the Bible, Quote Page 192, Printed by R. Johnson, Hull, England.
(Google Books Full View) link [/ref]

https://books.google.com/books?id=yOpUAAAAcAAJ&q=%22time+flies%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
"Time flies like an arrow; days and months like a weaver's shuttle."
[End excerpt]

The phrase "time flies" is ambiguous. In 1903 a linguistic puzzle
appeared in "The Royal Magazine" which asked readers to add
punctuation to a sentence to clarify its meaning:

[ref] 1903 January, The Royal Magazine, Volume 9, Number 51, Mr. X —
His Pages, Cryptic Sentences, Quote Page 299, Column 1, C. Arthur
Pearson Ltd., London, England. (Google Books Full View) link [/ref]

https://books.google.com/books?id=s3BEAQAAMAAJ&q=%22clever+catch%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
Time flies you cannot they pass at such irregular intervals.
or:
Time flies; you cannot; they pass at such irregular intervals.
("Time," of course, being used in the sense of timing a race, and
"flies" being the well-known summer insects.)
[End excerpt]

The ambiguity of "time flies" discussed in 1903 prefigured the
discussion of syntax and semantics in the 1960s. A separate Quote
Investigator article about the puzzle above is available here.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/08/time-pass/

In 1930 "Boys' Life" magazine transformed the puzzle into a joke:

[ref] 1930 February, Boys' Life, Think and Grin, Edited by Francis J.
Rigney, Quote Page 48, Column 3, Published by Boy Scouts of America,
New York. (Google Books Full View) link [/ref]

https://books.google.com/books?id=CgQU09UDVaIC&q=%22Time+flies%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
SCOUTMASTER: Time flies.
SMART TENDERFOOT: You can't. They go too fast.
[End excerpt]

Feedback welcome
Garson

On Sat, Sep 23, 2023 at 7:24 PM ADSGarson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Way back in 2010 there was a discussion on this list about the
> expression in the subject line. Also, in 2010 I created an article on
> this topic. Now, I plan to revise the article. The line has been
> attributed to Groucho Marx, but he probably did not say it.
>
> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/
>
> Your help is requested to access a volume of the "Harvard Alumni
> Bulletin" and to verify a pertinent Google snippet match. The goal is
> to obtain a complete and accurate citation. Here is the incomplete
> unverified data:
>
> Year: 1963
> Periodical: Harvard Alumni Bulletin
> Quote Page 205
>
> https://books.google.com/books?id=-LflAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22fruit+flies%22
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> These possibilities do not make
> much sense to a human; but they are
> syntactically correct, and the com-
> puter blindly produces all of these
> simply because it has not been taught,
> for example, that there is no such
> species of fly as "time flies." The
> computer could be "trained," of
> course, not to parse such a sentence
> the way it did. But then the machine
> could not correctly handle a sentence
> like "Fruit flies like bananas."
> [End excerpt]
>
> Here is a list of the desired metadata: Periodical name, year, month,
> article title, article author, publisher, start page of the article,
> page number of the quotation. It would be nice to have scans or photos
> showing: the full article containing the quotation, the periodical
> name, the publisher, the month, the year.
>
> The revised QI article will present some additional citations.
>
> Bill Mullins kindly sent me a valuable lead, a pointer to a book page
> that listed a citation in Fortune magazine. The citation was dated May
> 1960; however, my attempt to verify the citation has led me to
> conclude that the year 1960 is incorrect. Instead, the pertinent
> passage appeared in Fortune magazine in May 1964.
>
> [ref] 1964 May, Fortune, Machines That Man Can Talk With by John
> Pfeiffer, Start Page 153, Quote Page 194, (Series: Part III: The
> Boundless Age of the Computer) Time Inc., Chicago, Illinois. (Verified
> with scans) [/ref]
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> Conversations between man and machine will always be somewhat stilted
> until we have a computer that can understand idioms and interpret the
> particular meaning of a word or a sentence with several possible
> meanings. This is still a long way off, but a program written by
> Anthony Oettinger and Susumu Kuno of Harvard’s Computation Laboratory
> permits a computer to list all possible meanings.
>
> “Time flies like an arrow” may seem fairly straightforward to us, but
> a machine sees a number of other possibilities—for example, “Time the
> speed of flies as quickly as you can” (“time” being interpreted as a
> verb rather than a noun) and “Certain flies enjoy an arrow” (“time”
> being interpreted as an adjective, and “like” being interpreted as a
> verb). The machine could be instructed to rule out these particular
> offbeat parsings, but how would it handle the sentence, “Fruit flies
> like bananas”? Problems of semantics continue to plague investigators
> concerned with advanced man-machine communications.
> [End excerpt]
>
> Garson

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