Chapter & Verse
Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words
Marcia Chellis requests a source for “Everything is high school.”
Barbara Murray would like to verify an anecdote involving Tennessee Williams’s alleged reply when asked why he had stopped seeing a psychiatrist: “Well, that man kept nosing into my personal business….”
“pot…wall” (September-October). Eliot Kieval recognized the query as a variant of “Strive not as doth a crocke with a wall,” from Geoffrey Chaucer’s short poem “Good Counsel.”
“Age is a thief” (November-December). John T. Collins supplied, as an earlier example of this formulation, “Time, the subtle thief of youth,” from John Milton’s poem “On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-three.”
“logical fallacies” (November-December). Elizabeth Bernstein was the first of many readers to recognize this reference to Max Shulman's short story “Love Is a Fallacy,” from his 1951 collection The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. George Sicherman added that the story was subsequently turned into an episode of the eponymous television show (season 1, episode 22, airing on March 1, 1960, according to www.tv.com).
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