ABSTRACT
A second category with which the busy reference librarian may have a love-hate relationship is the search for the first person to utter some well-known saying or truism. I suspect that in the minds of many patrons there is a touching, albeit naive belief that if an expression is so common, it must be a simple matter to locate its origin in the local library. This attitude is probably at least partially caused by the tendency of governmental agencies to announce (without previously mentioning it to libraries) that such-and-such a publication is "available at your local library." As librarians who wrote to "The Exchange" often demonstrated, this is not always the case. Here is a collection of those popular sayings that did "come home" with answers.
