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In this issue's Alumni section:
The Aid Game - Music: Singer and Songsmith - Open Book: Thoreau's Wildness - Off the Shelf - Chapter & Verse

A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words

Gary Rosenberg seeks the specific source of the following lines, which are often attributed to Andrew Carnegie: "The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell."

John G. Conley is looking for the source of the quotation "He who sits on a red-hot stove will surely rise again."

Richard Steinberg would like to know the origin of the phrase "Hello-o-o-o, Betty!"

Drucilla Ramey wants to learn the name of the author and title of a poem containing the line "When I spoke harshly to my mother the day became astonishingly bright."

Frederick Wegener seeks help in identifying the sources of the following phrases: "Towers of fables immortal fashioned from mortal dreams"; "mighty wasteful empires"; "plentiful strutting manikins"; "the faun pursuing, the nymph pursued"; "cleared the mind of shams"; and "mighty splendent Rome."

"how pleasant life could be" (January-February). Elsa First noticed a similar quotation, attributed to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, used as the epigraph for Bernardo Bertolucci's film Before the Revolution: "He who did not live before the revolution did not know the sweetness of life." The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations provides a slightly different wording: Qui n'a pas vécu dans les années voisines de 1789 ne sait pas ce que c'est que le plaisir de vivre (He who has not lived during the years around 1789 can not know what is meant by the pleasure of life).


Send inquiries and answers to "Chapter and Verse," Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138. Readers seeking texts of poems or passages identified for others are asked to include a stamped, self-addressed, legal-sized envelope with their requests.

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