But this I know and know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell?
Can anyone tell me where this came from? B. Kliban did a cartoon on it many years ago, but I think I’ve heard of it elsewhere.
Ahem. DangerLibrarian to the rescue.
From Brewer’s dictionary of phrase and fable:*
*One of the older editions, don’t get a new one, which has had a lot of the weird stuff taken out. Dr. Brewer’s book is an amazingly cool volume, with interesting and enlightening information on every subject you could wish. It includes, for example, a list of the dying words of eminent personages, and the histories of proverbs and idioms. A most instructive volume, essential to every home library.
Drat. I hate it when I screw up my coding.
I have heard this delivered with the lines “But this I know, and know full well/I do not like thee, Dr Fell” following. The version above is in my daughter’s Nursery Rhymes book.
NB: in either Red Dragon or Hannibal, the escaped Hannibal Lecter is living in Italy and holds an eminent position in an Italian University (or something like that). Anyway, he uses the alias “Dr Fell” during his time there, hobnobbing with lots of people who have no idea who or what he is. I thought this was a masterstroke, deliciously understated, uncommonly chilling and marvellously frightening. Very funny, too!
Ross: That was Hannibal. Dr. Lecter was in prison from the beginning of Red Dragon.
In college, a fellow Latinist and I “back-translated” it from Kliban to something somewhat like
Magister Fell, non amo te
*something * possum nec quare
Sed eto scio et scio bene
Magister Fell, non amo te
which turned out to be pretty close to Martial, and rhymed in Latin as well.
Having had little need for conversational Latin in the intervening decades, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the linguistics of the above recollection, or translation.
It’s also used in Golden Age writer, John Dickson Carr’s: “The Black Spectacles” [English title: “The problem of the green capsule”] Dr. Gideon Fell is one of Carr’s curmudgean detectives.
Highly recommended, btw.
Saw the Thread title and just wanted to make sure we weren’t talking about Norman Fell! 'Cause I do love him. (Especially in The Graduate! “You’re not one of those outside agitators, are you? I won’t stand for that!”)
In a game called “Couplets,” where you change the second line of a well known rhyme, someone came up with:
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell
The reason is you charge like hell.
When I took my doctoral exams, one of my examiners was an unpleasant guy named Feldman. He and I just rubbed each other against the grain, and I couldn’t really put my finger on it. (I wrote two of my best papers in grad school for his classes, and they’re the only two grad courses in six years I got less than an A in.) In the 18th century oral exam, in which he was the examiner, I knew if the opportunity arose, I would recite
I do not love thee, Dr. Feldman
The reason why I cannot teldman
But this I know, and know full weldman
I do not love thee, Dr. Feldman.
Never came up. Probably just as well (dman.)