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

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Thanks for the responses from Ben, Dave, and David.
Looking forward to seeing what Dave discovers.
Excellent sleuthing, Ben. I agree that the date in the Harvard Alumni
Bulletin is probably November 23, 1963 based on GB target page number
205. Here is some data from snippets:

Page 009  Vol 66, No 1, Sep 28, 1963
Page 057  Vol 66, No 2, Oct 12, 1963
Page 105  Vol 66, No 3, Oct 26, 1963
Page 153  Vol 66, No 4, Nov 09, 1963
Page 201  Vol 66, No 5, Nov 23, 1963
Page 249  Vol 66, No 6, Dec 07, 1963
Page 297  Vol 66, No 7, Jan 11, 1964
. . . Page 681  Vol 66, No 16, Jun 16, 1964

A search for volume numbers suggest that the GB volume only contains
Volume 66. Importantly, page numbers seem to be associated with unique
pages within the GB volume.

The earliest attribution to Groucho I have found appeared in a Usenet
message from 1989. There are earlier Usenet messages that do not
mention Groucho. Groucho died in 1977.

[ref] Usenet discussion message, Timestamp: Aug 3, 1989, 5:16:23 PM,
Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac, From: Brian Moore, Subject: Introductory C
Books. (Google Groups Search; Accessed Sept 23, 2023) link [/ref]

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac/c/Nbm6xeM9IVI/m/Q3OFM0TVrm4J

[Begin excerpt]
***************************************************************************
* +++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ * *
* + + + + * "Time flies like an arrow, *
* + + +++ +++ * fruit flies like a banana." *
* + + + + * ---- Groucho Marx *
* +++++ +++++ + + * *
***************************************************************************
[End excerpt]

Back in 2010 participants in the mailing list discussion included Joel
S. Berson, Damien Hall, Fred Shapiro, Victor Steinbok, Seán
Fitzpatrick, David A. Daniel, Laurence Horn, and Margaret Lee. Sadly,
some are no longer with us.

At that time I also came across the Nov. 30, 1963 article in “The
Science News-Letter”, but I omitted it from the QI article because it
did not include the “fruit flies” example (as Ben notes). However, I
will mention it in the revised article.

https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2010-June/099773.html

Garson

On Sun, Sep 24, 2023 at 1:51 PM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Sep 24, 2023 at 12:20 PM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Anthony Oettinger made a presentation earlier in Nov. 1963 from which the
> > "time flies" example may have been taken, but it doesn't appear in the
> > published version of that presentation.
> >
> > ---
> > https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1463822.1463864
> > Anthony G. Oettinger, "Syntactic Structure and Ambiguity of English."
> > AFIPS '63 (Fall): Proceedings of the November 12-14, 1963, Fall Joint
> > Computer Conference, pp. 397–418
> > ---
> >
>
> Apologies, that paper is properly attributed to Susumu Kuno and Anthony G.
> Oettinger.
>
> This article suggests Kuno was the one to first report the "time flies"
> example:
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224185370_Towards_crowdsourcing_translation_tasks_in_library_cataloguing_a_pilot_study
>
> This later article by Kuno gives the example, but again omits the "banana"
> bit:
>
> ---
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/364995.365689
> Susumu Kuno, "The predictive analyzer and a path elimination technique"
> Communications of the ACM, Vol. 8, Issue 7(July 1965), pp. 453-462.
> For example, assume that the input sentence "TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW AND
> THEY ARE FLYING PLANES." is to be analyzed by a predictive analyzer. The
> two clauses in the sentence are triply ambiguous and their ambiguities are
> mutually independent.
> TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW
> 1. Time passes as quickly as an arrow.
> 2. A species of flies called "time flies" are fond of an arrow.
> 3. You shall time the flies which are like an arrow. (or You shall, as
> quickly as an arrow, time the flies.)
> [...]
> ---
>
> --bgz
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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