(no subject)

[geekchick]

Found on metaquotes, I've been laughing about the responses to this post all night.

Some choice quotes from various responses:

Wow! I am surprised (überraschen) and overjoyed (überglücklich) to discover that the prefix über- can only be used with nouns!

And also that it can only be taken literally. German history makes so much more sense when you realize that the slogan "Deutschland über Alles" means that German is physically situated above everything else. I suppose when you believe your entire country is floating somewhere above Europe, it's bound to lead to some oddities of foreign policy.

Among the reasons it can be difficult to be a grammar-whore, grammar-nazi, grammar-temple-concubine or what have you, is the fact that English does not merely borrow words from other languages. English chases other languages into dark alleys, clubs them over the head and turns out their pockets looking for loose vocabulary.

This process is, to put it gently, not pretty.

Comments

[wdomburg.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty well convinced that it originated with Nicoll after a bit more digging. Consider:

• None of the sites attributing the quote to Washington list can identify where or when he said it; at best they cite other quote databases or "none". The only exception I saw was one listing their source as "Discovering Grammar" by Anne Lobeck. I'd almost guarantee that book also fails to cite an original source.
  
• There are only 92 results from the google link you gave. There are 1250 if you repeat the search with "James D. Nicoll" instead.
  
• Plugging the same snippet of the quote into groups.google.com failed to return any results prior to May 15, 1990 - the post that James made.
  
• Particularly in light of the lack of evidence of the Washington attribution, I have no reason to call James a liar when he claims the quote as original
  

Yours is the first mention I've heard of Spider Robinson, and using the snippet you gave it doesn't bring up anything but quote collections including the Nicoll quote as well as an unrelated Robinson quote.

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

Yours is the first mention I've heard of Spider Robinson, and using the snippet you gave it doesn't bring up anything but quote collections including the Nicoll quote as well as an unrelated Robinson quote.

Go back to the original thread. Someone else there thinks that Spider Robinson said it in the 1960's. It's a slightly different quote, of course.