Frequent commenter cuchuflete writes:
There is an expression heard with some frequency in these parts, “little by slowly”. When I first heard it a quarter century back, it was disconcerting to my Midwestern/Middle Atlantic ears. It, or more aptly I, have now become naturalized and it is ‘normal’ to my ears. Same goes for my Nottingham raised lady. We both savor it.
Last week I googled it. Top of results page was some AI slop declaring it a mistaken form of little by little. Little by slowly has additional meaning, whatever its origins. […] I haven’t been able to find anything about the origin of the phrase.
He cites a Stephen King use: “Now after reading this I’m going to step up my routine, little by slowly (as we say heah in Maine) to improve my distance.” Anybody know anything about the history of this quaint phrase?
Book title (2020): Little by Slowly: From Trauma to Recovery. So not so unusual, although I too had never heard it before.
Da yayyafi kogi kan cika.
“By drizzle the river gets full.”
@de
Are you sure this is not a polite version of a piece of folk-wisdom involving human rather than divine secretion? Compare “Cry me a river!”
Yayyafi seems only to have a meteorological sense, alas.
The equivalent Kusaal proverb is possibly capable of a more “God helps those who help themselves” interpretation, along the lines you suggest:
Bi’el bi’el ka kɔlig pɛ’ɛl nɛ.
“Little by little and a river is full.”
Interesting that it’s used to translate רביב from Psalm 72, while Wiktionary seems to confirm that it’s light rain.
Old Spanish saying, Gota a gota, la mar se agota. Drop by drop, the ocean is drained.
But what of slowly?
I know nothing about “little by slowly”, but it sounds to me like a deliberate mash-up of synonyms, like “Perish forbid!” or, uh, the other one.
If you click through past the first two or three pages of Google results of the phrase (in quotes) you get a fair number of instances where it is used in recovery settings like AA. Stephen King himself has been in recovery for 30 years or more and probably picked up the phrase in AA, rather than as a Maine-ism. (He used it in several books.) I think it is used in AA to emphasize that recovery is not only gradual (“little by little”) but takes a long time (slowly). The book cited by Stu above is the story of the author’s recovery from alcoholism and drug abuse.
Of course, the AA folks may have picked it up somewhere rather than coining it, and it surely has escaped AA and become useful in other settings, such as King’s.
Now, that’s very interesting; thanks!
Earliest GBooks occurrences I found are from 2002 and 2003, in fantasy novels by Michael Stackpole (raised in Vermont, since his twenties living in Arizona).
David Pascoe, an Ohio-raised boat expert, used it here in 2000.
There’s an episode of Midsomer Murders where it’s a plot point that two people both say “the long and the tall of it”.
I remember that one!
@MMcM:
This is perhaps explicable geographically. When it rains in the West African savanna, it usually rains properly. I remember being once literally soaked to the skin after walking a few yards to my car.
So “light” rain might well apply to pretty much anything short of that.
The Kusaal version there has samilimmiug “showers of rain, drizzle.”
I thought of that Midsomer Murders episode too while I was reading this post.
In the same Gbooks (eh) I found a lone citation from 1969 in A Long Row of Candles: Memoirs and Diaries, 1934-1954 by one Cyrus Leo Sulzberger (yes, one of those Sulzbergers), who btw also wrote a memoir An Age of Mediocrity: Memoirs and Diaries, 1963-1972. What happened between 1954 and 1963, no idea.
Anyway, the only snippet gBooks agrees to share with me is from p.48 with the following dialog:
PEASANT: Welcome to our home and share with us what God has willed us, even if it be salt and bread.
C.: God help you and, as they say, may your chimney be higher.
P.: Have you been able?
C.: Little by slowly.
For my taste, he could just have printed a dictionary of colloquialisms.
Antedated: Elizabeth Morse, The Emerald Buddha, 1935
D.O.: The Sulzberger is here (Internet Archive checkout). The dialogue is supposedly the manner of hospitality in Albanian villages around Shkodër, after a visit in 1939.
(Also: “In the northern clan of Mirditi, run by a Christian chief, girls could speak to no man except a relative for fear of ostracism. The polite greeting to a lady was ‘Strength to your arms’ and the accepted reply was ‘Sugar to your mouth, we bow with honor.’”)
Y, thanks! I tried Internet Archive, but without an account. Ok then, it’s translation. Maybe. I don’t know Albanian, in Russian there is потихоньку-полегоньку (quietly and lightly)
I’m not sure if it’s a literal translation, or an idiomatic one, or an over-exoticising one. I suspect he didn’t stay long enough to learn much of the language.
The Emerald Budddha bit, gleaned from the snippets, is “… which latter crime was expressed as ‘wounding the Buddha’s foot, so as to make it bleed.’ No wonder the old goat had laughed! But did not the foreigners have a saying: ‘He who laughs worst, laughs last’? However—little by slowly, and they would see who should do the worst laughing. He, himself, would not risk eternal punishment for any girl…”
A review of the book (in another snippet) begins, “Every so often, preferably in the spring, we yearn to read about the priceless jools stolen from a heathen temple…”
What happened between 1954 and 1963, no idea.
Last of the Giants, referring to de Gaulle.
And finishing with, Postscript with a Chinese Accent: Memoirs and Diaries, 1972-73.
The Sulzberger is here (Internet Archive checkout).
From which we learn that Albanians are always saying “dort beer, dort bloo, dort hitch, hitch beer, blue beer, beer chak, dort gatch.”
I’ve noticed that. But I didn’t like to say anything.
Sulzberger seems to have been a CIA asset (though, to be fair, he was far from the only US journalist in that position):
https://web.archive.org/web/20200408030842/http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
A bit more on cross-linguistic Russian/Albanian/Sulzbergerian sayings. “Sugar to your mouth, we bow with honor” sounds strangely similar to Russian “Вашими бы устами мед пить” (with some variation) “with your lips [it is good] to drink honey” (if you don’t think it makes much, or any, sense, don’t worry, it doesn’t), meaning “I wish it were so”. The second half of the phrase is similar to “честь имею кланяться” (“it’s my honor to bow [out]”), a very dated parting formula.
And then, at the bottom of page 49, C.L. mentions droshkie. What? Etymology is pretty interesting, but Albania? At least it gives me an excuse to quote Kozma Prutkov at length
ЦАПЛЯ И БЕГОВЫЕ ДРОЖКИ
Басня
На беговых помещик ехал дрожках.
Летела цапля; он глядел.
«Ах! почему такие ножки
И мне Зевес не дал в удел?»
А цапля тихо отвечает:
«Не знаешь ты, Зевес то знает!»
Пусть баснь сию прочтёт всяк строгий семьянин:
Коль ты татарином рождён, так будь татарин;
Коль мещанином — мещанин,
А дворянином — дворянин.
Но если ты кузнец и захотел быть барин,
То знай, глупец,
Что, наконец,
Не только не дадут тебе те длинны ножки,
Но даже отберут коротенькие дрожки.
GT with my (ahem) help
THE HERON AND THE DROSHKI
A fable
A landlord rode in a fast droshky.
A heron flew by; he observed.
“Ah! Why did not gave me Zeus
such legs as well?”
And heron quietly replied:
“It doesn’t you, it’s Zeus who knows!”
Each stern family man must read this fable:
If you’re born a Tatar, be a Tatar;
A tradesman? Be a tradesman then,
And if a nobleman, then be a nobleman.
But if you are a blacksmith and want to be a gentleman,
Then know, fool,
That in the end
Not only will they not give you those lengthy legs,
But they will take away your paltry drags.
Re Sulzberger on Albanians: the “funny foreigners” trope, quite apart its smug discourtesy, correlates strongly with grotesque inaccuracy in reporting of the actual facts.
(Similarly, people who look down on the locals seldom succeed in learning their language adequately.)
Dort beer, etc., is from “Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania” by Edward Lear. Dunno if Lear was also a NYT staff writer.
It was the famous one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear
He read, but did not speak, Spanish.
Wer zuletzt lacht, hat den Witz nicht verstanden.
“He who laughs last didn’t get the joke.”
“If you’re born a Tatar, be a Tatar;
A tradesman? Be a tradesman then,
And if a nobleman, then be a nobleman.”
That reminds me that on NPR this morning “Be yourself; everyone else is taken” was attributed to Oscar Wilde. (By Don Gonyea, who was hosting Weekend Edition, not by some random interviewee.)
“I didn’t say half the things attributed to me on the Internet.”
— Oscar Wilde, or maybe Abraham Lincoln.
“I didn’t say half the things I said” is attributed to Yogi Berra. Or is it?
Always be yourself.
Unless you can be Batman.
Then
Always be Batman.
– attribution long forgotten
German is a hot mess of sibilants and affricates. Even though I was taught German, I have trouble saying “wer zuletzt lacht…” accurately every time. I can sometimes.
@Jerry Sullivan
“… a deliberate mash-up of synonyms, like “Perish forbid!” or, uh, the other one.”
“Spine curdling”?
I like to bring out the whatchamacallit “There are two kinds of people in the world. The ones who finish their sentences.” and see when people start laughing. The sooner they do, the more interesting they usually turn out to be to talk to. (One colleague took four or five beats before the penny dropped, and then he started sending me “scientific” articles on contrails and how 5G was dangerous. And sure, the FCC allows 10 [or was it 100] times as much radiative flux for 5G as for 4G, but flux is measured per steradian and the allowed antenna profile is narrower to match so the total power available for frying your brain is actually less. The relevant numbers were down on something like page 60 of the PDF, after 59 pages of scaremongering, but now I know what they were misunderstanding).
Rechts trips a lot of learners. [çt͡s]…
Polish /fʂt͡ʂɲɛʂ/, Georgian /prt͡skvna/, Nuxálk /xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ/…
Hate to nitpick Stephen King, but, “heah in Maine”? No suh. Weah’s the linkin’ ah?
Polish /fʂt͡ʂɲɛʂ/, Georgian /prt͡skvna/, Nuxálk /xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ/…
English /sɪksθs/…
German /ʃɪmp͡fst/…
Da aspsks in a sentence made up by Otto Jespersen: Et holmbladsk lys styrke er større end et aspsks ~ “The strength of a candle from Holmblad is greater than that of one from Asp”; those were the main candle manufacturers 100 years ago, now merged as Asp Holmblad. lys is the genetive (of lys); it could also be spelled lys’ but pronounced the same.
In my pronunciation the vowel is rounded to [ʏ], while [ɪ] sounds a bit pedantic. In fact, pronouncing an unrounded vowel before that cluster of three labials/labiodentals takes conscious effort for me.
Yeah, that’s a well-known northern feature.
My own /ɪ/ is at least as close to [i] as to [ɪ] because there is no separate /iː/ (or /uː/ or /yː/) in most or all Bavarian dialects… that said, my labial consonants are not rounded and don’t behave like they are; Mandarin bo po mo fo vs. de te ne se does not come to me naturally.