Talk:Ogden Nash

Cleanup

I've marked this article for cleanup because it uses a deprecated heading, "Verified", which fails to provide any advantage over "Attributed". (Who verified it? How?) A "Sourced" section should be created, into which should be placed any quotes whose precise sources have been determined. (That allows other editors to easily "verify" the material.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:00, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

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I cleaned the article up a bit, removing a couple things:

• "At last I've found the secret,
  that guarantees success.
  To err, and err, and err again,
  but less, and less, and less."

A very similar quote stems from the pen of Piet Hein: "The road to wisdom ...".

I removed the above entry from the artiicle page as this seems very likely to be a very recent misattribution, and perhaps a variant translation or alteration of lines by Piet Hein. There appears to be only about a half dozen sites on the internet that attribute this to Ogden Nash, perhaps the earliest appearing in "Heuristics for Iterative Software Development" by Drasko Sotirovski, IEEE Software, vol. 18,  no. 3,  pp. 66-73,  (May/June  2001) where the author states "...as Bob Glass has said, quoting Ogden Nash, "At last I've found the secret that guarantees success: to err, and err, and err again...". If it were truly an Ogden Nash poem it's citations would likely be far more prominent, and I wish to prevent the use of it in our own article space as giving the attribution any sort of prominence or apparent sanction such as I believe it very probably does not merit.

Also removed was:

• What's a fish without an eye? --A FSHHHHH! :)

I removed this from "misattributions" because it seems to be merely a user's "joke". ~ Kalki 10:58, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Ogden Nash. --Antiquary 19:31, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

• Some tortures are physical And some are mental, But the one that is both Is dental.

• Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets.

• My field — the minor idiocies of humanity.

• Too clever is dumb.

• Love is a word
  That is constantly heard/Hate is a word
  That is not
  Love, I am told
  Is more precious than gold
  Love, I have heard
  Is hot
  But hate is the verb
  That to me is superb
  And love, just a drug
  On the mart
  For any kiddie from school
  Can love like a fool
  But hating, my boy
  Is an art

• Smallpox is natural, Vaccine ain't.

• If the German people had had a more highly developed sense of humor, they'd never have let Hitler pull the wool over their eyes. The first time they saw someone goose-stepping and raising a stiff arm and shouting, 'Heil Hitler,' they'd have keeled over laughing.

Source of this one?

This one I've carried in my head for decades, and while it definitely has a Nash-like feel to it, I can't find it in any of the linked collections of samples and I therefore assume I'm mistaken about its source. Can someone give me a proper (or even best-guess) origin for it? Many thanks. (P.S., sorry for the formatting, I'm relatively new here and unfamiliar with the proper coding.)

The bees are very busy souls, They've got no time for birth control; And that is why, in times like these, There are so many sons of bees.

Here's a version that's somewhat longer, and it's not attributable to Ogden Nash. Here's one of the places I found it: http://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/linux_songs_poems/toc_id/1-1-31/s/585 This is the story of the bee Whose sex is very hard to see

You cannot tell the he from the she But she can tell, and so can he

The little bee is never still She has no time to take the pill

And that is why, in times like these There are so many sons of bees.