Slow on the Uptake
Dec. 18th, 2009 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowDefinitely slow, sometimes.
On the American Dialect Society list, there's an ongoing discussion, trying to pinpoint the first appearance of the saying that "history is written by the winners". It recently passed into consideration of French antecedents, which predate the first English version by quite a bit. One poster then said that he was looking forward to finding the Greek (Thucydides?) or Latin (Josephus?) antecedents. Since I despise that saying, I immediately leaped in to point out that both of them came from the losing sides in the wars they chronicled...
which, of course, was his point. :slaps forehead in mortification:
On the American Dialect Society list, there's an ongoing discussion, trying to pinpoint the first appearance of the saying that "history is written by the winners". It recently passed into consideration of French antecedents, which predate the first English version by quite a bit. One poster then said that he was looking forward to finding the Greek (Thucydides?) or Latin (Josephus?) antecedents. Since I despise that saying, I immediately leaped in to point out that both of them came from the losing sides in the wars they chronicled...
which, of course, was his point. :slaps forehead in mortification:
