[Ads-l] "close, but no cigar" antedating (1928)

[Shapiro, Fred]

Thanks, Dave, this is a great antedating, and thanks also for all your other excellent postings over the years.

When I published the Yale Book of Quotations in 2006, with many fewer online databases available, the oldest citation I could find for "close but no cigar" was an Annie Oakley movie from 1935.

Maybe "close but no cigar" was some kind of Ivy League thing.  Here's an earlier occurrence, the headline of an item about a basebsll game between fraternities:

close but no cigar (OED 1929)

1927 Yale Daily News 28 May 2/3  (headline) Close but No Cigar.

Fred Shapiro


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Subject: "close, but no cigar" antedating (1928)


OED has July 1929, found by Stephen Goranson in 2013.

Daily Princetonian (Princeton, New Jersey), 13 January 1928, 2/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

"The Triangle Club is a great institution and all that, but just the same we wish they would cut down a little on those wisecracks which are applicable to Campus life. Too many undergraduates are getting up “parties of four” to do various inane things, and just a few too many of our friends are telling us that “history will never know” that we forgot to go to Chapel Sunday. But the end of our patience will have come if Professor Cawley hands back a profusely red-inked essay with the sprightly remark, 'close, but no cigar'."

Note that the July 1929 cite is an alumni note for the class of '28, so it seems that the phrase was popular on the Princeton campus that year, although I don't think Princeton is the locus of the origin.



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