Chapter & Verse

A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words

Dale Higbee hopes to learn the source of a comment by Archibald MacLeish: “We know all the answers; it’s the questions we don’t know.”

Alethea Black requests the title and author of a poem about how life would be if we grew younger over time. The last line is, “And suffering, of course, is joy.”

Karl Engelman asks if anyone can identify an “insightful commentary” that defines conversation between two people as, in fact, an interaction among six participants, with each side consisting of the person speaking, the person the speaker thinks he is, and the person the other speaker thinks the first speaker is.

“Rooty-toot-toot” (November-December 2005). David Challinor, whose father was in the first graduating class of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), in 1908, recalls hearing this verse sung in Pittsburgh in the 1920s. But Catherine Dwyer and other fans of Rice University (“Institute” until 1960; opened in 1912) vehemently claimed this variant of what may be an old Boy Scout cheer. (Robert Bradbury supplied a traditional last line, rendered in falsetto: “Our class won the bible!”) Among other candidates: the city jail and MIT.



Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138.

You might also like

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Studying ChatGPT Like a Psychologist

Cognitive science helps penetrate the AI “black box”

Reparations as Public Health

A Harvard forum on the racial health gap

Most popular

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Diagnosis by Fiction

The “Healing Quartet,” by “Samuel Shem,” probes medicine—and life.

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

More to explore

Darker Days

The current disquiets compared to Harvard’s Vietnam-era traumas

Making Space

The natural history of Junko Yamamoto’s art and architecture

Spellbound on Stage

Actor and young adult novelist Aislinn Brophy