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Michael McLeod
My mother was a class act. I may or may not have mentioned this before but She was the daughter of a doctor and she grew up in a two story victorian home a couple houses down from - I think it's holy rosary church -- on Main Street. Her father had his office built onto the front of the home. Last time I was in Columbus both the house and the office ad-on were still there.
Anyway one thing my mother used to say was: "Comparisons are odious." I always wondered where she heard that -- I mean from her parents, I'd guess, but they must have heard it somewhere. Anyway today, after all these years, I looked it up. Here's what I found. The answer I discovered quoted the "OED," which I'm pretty sure stands for "Oxford English Dictionary," which is an English-language literary bible of sorts.
I just wondered if anybody else had this quoted to them back in the day. I didn't go around saying and I couldn't tell you for sure if it kept me from being any more judgmental than I might otherwise have been, but the saying itself always has stuck with me.
Here's what the OED has to say:
"Comparisons are odious."
According to the OED, that phrase has been around since 1440, and has been "joyfully pirated by Cervantes, Marlow, Dunne, and, of course, Shakespeare. The Bard, naturally, put his own spin on it in Much Ado About Nothing."
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