What’s the origin of the expression, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings”? –Dolly Gattozzi, Oakland, California
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First let’s get it straight: the original expression was “the opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” Amazingly, sources agree on exactly who coined this expression and approximately when. It was first used around 1976 in a column in the San Antonio News-Express by sportswriter Dan Cook. (Cook does not recall the precise date or what the column was about.) Cook, who is also a sportscaster for KENS-TV in San Antonio, repeated the line during a broadcast in April 1978 to buck up local basketball fans, dejected because the San Antonio Spurs were down three games to one in the playoffs against the Washington Bullets. Bullets coach Dick Motta heard the broadcast and used the expression himself to caution fans against overconfidence after his team finished off the Spurs and took on Philadelphia. The phrase became the team’s rallying cry as they went on to win the championship and from there it entered the common pot of the language. Most newsies aspire to nothing grander than a Pulitzer Prize, but Cook can tell his grandkids he’s in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs.
Your reply to the question, “What does ‘that’s the exception that proves the rule’ mean?” [August 2] was not quite right. The quote refers to a logician’s axiom: that which can never be false can likewise never be true. If a statement cannot be admitted ever to be false, then it is a concealed tautology, i.e., a dogma. An instance of a proposition’s not-being-the-case serves to affirm its existential validity, assuming it does not commit a violation of the rules of logic. Both logical validity and existential verification are required for one to justly assert that such-and-such is true… –Max A. Langley, Santa Barbara, California
