I am not asking for “What does it mean?” or “When and how did the concept originate?” The internet is full of the same answers to them. I am looking for the earliest, published example of the specific phrase, and the SDMB has the top men and women for it, with the top tools for finding it.
Thank you in advance for your help. A floor supervisor has given me the task of finding the origin, and I would like to deluge her with data so she never asks me to do that again. At a different job, where I could use the innertubes (the funny thing is that, and some customer or other reminds me of the irony daily, I sell internet services), I’d have three pages of intensely boring text in her hands in a few minutes, and for most topics I could still do it from home, but this is a harder nut to crack because nobody seems to have done it before AND put it in Google-able form.
Here’s something on a site devoted to English phrases. I found the site by Googling “dictionary of phrases.” There are probably other reference sites that trace the origin of the phrase - this is just the first one I found.
According to Google Ngrams (don’t know how complete their coverage is claimed to be) it doesn’t show up as a phrase until the 1970s.
Interestingly, “shoot the messenger” came up as early as the 1820s, but that only literally - that is, in news reports describing the untimely death of a hapless letter-bearer. Which I don’t think counts for these purposes.
Sophocles is full of scenes wherein tyrants such as Oedipus terrify messengers for bringing them bad news, and where they beg not to be killed for conveying the bad news. I wouldn;t be surprised if there were some lines in an ancient Greek tragedy spoken by the messenger saying something like “Please don’t kill me, I’m merely the messenger.” Would that count?
That is wicked cool and the only thing better that reams of data is a chart! And this is a chart with pages of explanation and more charts! She’ll hate this! Thank you very much. She’s convinced that the phrase–not the sentiment–is ancient. Sure, I can tell of Lucullus and Tigranes, with a side trip through the Mithridatic Wars, but I’m suddenly and uncharacteristically ambitious to be her boss and I don’t wish to seem ungracious.
PRR, the closest Sophocles got was apparently “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news,” which is in the Wikipedia entry. And guys, I’m hurt that so many assumed I didn’t do [del]the most-basic[/del] intensive scholarly research before asking for help, even going to the second page of Google results. The people of the SDMB taught me a long time ago that, by not doing so, I left myself open to a trip to http://lmgtfy.com/.
It’s interesting that “Don’t shoot the piano player; he’s doing the best he can,” is 108 years older.
Actually, there is a scene in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra where, i think, Cleopatra tells a Messenger he will die if he brings news that any harm had come to Antony.
Perhaps this is the scene The Niply Elder was thinking of.
Other plays have similar ideas. I just thought the Pharoah connection was cute.
