The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #173668   Message #4211624
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
14-Nov-24 - 11:37 AM
Thread Name: seeking quote source (poss WC Fields)
Subject: RE: seeking quote source (poss WC Fields)
That's awfully general to aim at a general search. I suggest you use Google Advanced Search and play with the settings.

If you know the phrase is exact, then put it in the "this exact word or phrase" line, otherwise try "all these words" with quotes (almost the same as exact phrase, but might yield different results). Choose different sites or domains to narrow it (.edu, .com, .org, etc.) and you can add W.C. Fields (may want more about him - his full name was William Claude Dukenfield) as a qualifier.

You might also want to see if that phrase appeared in print around the time he said it, so try the Google NGrams search. With that one you can narrow it down by years, so the years he was most active making films (or the years you remember first using the phrase) might reveal a written source. Keep in mind that scholarly works in later years might be as or more likely to mention that phrase, so you can search on books or book chapters about Fields and then plug the years into the NGram search. Google has scanned a gazillion books, and while they don't make all of them available through Google Books (yet another place to look), all of those words are available to the NGram search.

It also occurs to me that sometimes these old memories take a left turn from way back when - in case it *wasn't* W.C. Fields who said it, but someone in one of his movies, or a similarly portly older actor of his day, you might want to do the search without Fields' name.

This may be more information than you need, but here are the tools to start with. (Ex-university-research-library here.)