{"id":17465,"date":"2018-06-06T12:02:41","date_gmt":"2018-06-06T19:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17465"},"modified":"2018-06-06T12:02:41","modified_gmt":"2018-06-06T19:02:41","slug":"book-throwing-quote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/06\/06\/book-throwing-quote\/","title":{"rendered":"Book-throwing quote"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I recently had occasion to quote the line \u201cIt is not a book to be lightly thrown aside. It should be thrown with great force,\u201d a variant of which I had always seen attributed to Dorothy Parker.<\/p>\r\n<p>But it\u2019s my sad duty today to inform you that Parker may not have originated this joke.<\/p>\r\n<p>A web search led me to a <a href=\"https:\/\/quoteinvestigator.com\/2013\/03\/26\/great-force\/\">Quote Investigator page<\/a> from 2013, which does some interesting tracing of various related jokes over time. It tentatively concludes that the line in question came from a book review by Sid Ziff in the <cite>Los Angeles Mirror-News<\/cite>, sometime in or before early 1960. Parker did make a couple of amusing comments about throwing or dropping various books (as quoted in that QI page), but there doesn\u2019t seem to be evidence that she originated the not-lightly-but-with-force framing.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny","category-quotations"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17466,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17465\/revisions\/17466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}