Chapter & Verse

Gerard Lenthall wishes to learn the identity of “Garamaz,” a 1938 reference.

Thomas Lemann would like a source for words attributed to Pericles: “One who forms a judgment on any point but cannot explain himself clearly might as well never have thought at all on the subject.”

George Feifer hopes to determine where, when, but first whether, General George S. Patton ever said, “Now let’s go get the Russians”—or something very similar. 

Matthew Schuerman seeks the source of a simile: “The blood of children ran through the streets like the blood of children.”

“The problem with the ‘melting pot’” (January-February). David Zarembka identified radical songwriter Charlie King as the author of this statement.

“Naked as a jaybird” (March-April). Peter Salmon could not give an ur-citation, but wrote, “The physical reference must be to the fact that bluejays tend to lose all their neck feathers at once in a summer molt, making them look naked and not like ‘Mister bluejay, full of sass in them baseball clothes of his’ (James Whitcomb Riley), as we find them the rest of the year. This phenomenon is noted in bird guides, but I have observed it only in Vermont, not here in Pennsylvania.” Trevor Lloyd-Evans, of the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences in Manomet, Massachusetts, an expert on molting, explains, “Very frequently in the post-breeding or post-juvenal molt of the subspecies of bluejay found on the East Coast from Maine to Florida, the bird’s entire head will lose its feathers—nakedness indeed. Molts in colder climes tend to be more rapid, or are abbreviated in scope so that they occur faster than molts in warmer areas, where molting may proceed at such a dignified pace as to be almost indiscernible.”

“The young men will go fight” (March-April). George Halperin recognized this excerpt from the decree of August 23, 1793, passed by the National Convention, authorizing a levée en masse, or universal conscription, to defend the French revolutionary government against its enemies.