Origins
The name Jack Sprat was used of people of small stature in the sixteenth century. This rhyme was an English proverb from at least the mid-seventeenth century. It appeared in John Clarke's collection of sayings in 1639 in the form:
- Jack will eat not fat, and Jull doth love no leane.
- Yet betwixt them both they lick the dishes cleane.
The saying entered the canon of English nursery rhymes when it was printed in Mother Goose's Melody around 1765, but it may have been adopted for use with children much earlier.
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Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
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