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).

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail to [email protected].

You might also like

How Not to Write about Minorities

Viet Thanh Nguyen urges moving beyond the “sob story.”

Endowment Expectations

The context for Harvard Management Company’s 2023 results

Football 2023: Harvard 34-Brown 31

The Crimson outlasts the Bears in an Ivy nighttime shootout.

Most popular

The Outsiders’ Insider

Turning the Black List into a business, to modernize Hollywood’s dream machine

Winslow Homer's Early Days

A mansion promotes artist Winslow Homer’s roots in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Reading Tea Leaves

Digitized herbaria collections data allow researchers to predict future plant ranges.

More to explore

Picking Team Players

A test can identify these productivity-boosting personnel.

Irene Soto Marín

Ancient history professor studies coins, ceramics, and Zelda.

Getting His Reps in

Anwar Floyd-Pruitt’s wildly profuse art