Friday 11 July 2014

Who Was It That Once Said,

'two nations divided by a common language?'



I guess this is what they were talking about, as she is spoke in the U.S. as an aside the quote is ascribed to as far as I can tell three people, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and even Winston Churchill, ‘Was it Wilde or Shaw?’ is the main question people ask, the answer appears to be: both, in The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’, however, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, but without giving a source, the quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Reader’s Digest (November 1942), Churchill used the phrase in his speech at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (September 6, 1943); in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 7, p. 6825, for some popular phrases that people never said have a look here, what more can I say?

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