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 chapterandverse@harvardmag.com.

Click here for the January-February 2008 issue table of contents

You might also like

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes Announced

Winners across five categories, from commentary on Gaza to criticism on public architecture

Doctors for Change

Countway Library exhibit explores historic anti-nuclear activism

Miniature Worlds

How “paper peepshows” brought distant realms to life

Most popular

Why Taxi Drivers Don’t Die of Alzheimer’s

Explaining taxi and ambulance drivers’ protection against Alzheimer’s disease.

A Dashboard for Artificial Intelligence

Computer science professor Fernanda Viégas believes “dashboards” that disclose AI models’ biases can help laypeople control AI.  

Explore More From Current Issue

The Sum of Our Choices

On the limitations of a prevailing worldview

Brief Harvard News Spring 2025

Physician-authors address Commencement and Alumni Day, new School of Education Dean, and more