Chapter & Verse

Winthrop Drake Thies seeks the legal citation for a British Admiralty case "which supported the necessity of the foreign tribunal having...

Winthrop Drake Thies seeks the legal citation for a British Admiralty case "which supported the necessity of the foreign tribunal having had personal — or at least in rem — jurisdiction for a foreign judgment to be respected by asking rhetorically: 'Shall the writs of Antigua bind the whole world?'"

 

Virginia Wetherbee would like information about the origin of her Southern mother-in-law's expression "snatching [someone] skywest and crooked." A variant is traced to the mid 1800s in Robert Chapman's New Dictionary of American Slang (1986).

 

"shaves the victim's cane" (May-June). Paul Hendrick identified Marc Connelly's O. Henry Award-winning story "Coroner's Inquest," a tale of rivalry between two dwarfs, first published in Collier's Weekly (February 1930). Michael Bell noted that the same idea appears in the song "Did You Do That, Sid?," sung by Jackie Gleason in Take Me Along, the 1959 musical comedy by Bob Merrill based on Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!

 

"young detectives" (May-June). Charles Shurcliff, who "grew up with The Secret of Dead Man's Cove," sends word that the Mackie family detective stories were written in the 1930s by R.J. McGregor.

 

Correction: We thank Judith Robbins for pointing out our misstating of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson's first name in the May-June issue and hope that someone can provide an attribution for "It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that ain't so!"

 

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

     

Most popular

How MAGA Went Mainstream at Harvard

Trump, TikTok, and the pandemic are reshaping Gen Z politics.

Bringing Korean Stories to Life

Composer Julia Riew writes the musicals she needed to see.

Jodie Foster Honored at Radcliffe Day 2025

The actress and director discussed her film career and her transformative time at Yale.

Explore More From Current Issue

Catherine Zipf smiling, wearing striped shirt and dark sweater outdoors.

Preserving the History of Jim Crow Era Safe Havens

Architectural historian Catherine Zipf is building a database of Green Book sites.  

Man, standing in small group of people outside the courthouse, holding a sign that reads "HANDS OFF HARVARD" in red letters

Harvard’s Summer in Court

What Columbia’s settlement means for the University

Two women in traditional kimonos, one lighting a cigarette, in a scene from Apart from You.

Harvard Film Archive Spotlights Japanese Director Mikio Naruse

A retrospective of the filmmaker’s works, from Floating Clouds to Flowing