My Postillion Has Been Struck By Lightning

"My postillion has been struck by lightning", "Our postillion has been struck by lightning", and other variations on the same pattern, are often given as examples of the ridiculous phrases supposed to have been found in phrase books or language instruction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word postillion may occur in its alternative spelling postilion.

Although various forms of the sentence are widely cited, the exact wording and the context in which it is said to have originally been used vary. For example, a teaching manual attributes it to a Portuguese-English phrasebook:

The phrase-book for Portuguese learners of English which included the often-quoted and bizarre sentence 'Pardon me, but your postillion has been struck by lightning' demonstrates a total lack of sense of context: who can have said this, to whom and in what circumstances?

By contrast a linguistics textbook mentions the supposedly "apocryphal" phrase during a description of foreign language teaching in "the schoolrooms of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century":

entences—especially constructed to contain only the grammar and vocabulary which had already been covered—were laboriously translated, in writing, into and out of the student's first language. Such sentences, often bizarrely remote from any conceivable use, have been the occasion for jokes ever since. We have probably all heard references to the apocryphal "My postilion has been struck by lightning" and the infamous plume de ma tante.

Read more about My Postillion Has Been Struck By Lightning:  Origin, Notable Sightings, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words struck and/or lightning:

    He admired the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only with the weakening of this generator whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for his torture to be appeased. But it appeared that the power to make him suffer of one of Odette’s statements seemed exhausted, then one of these statements on which Swann’s spirit had until then not dwelled, an almost new word relayed the others and struck him with new vigor.
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    God from the mount of Sinai, whose grey top
    Shall tremble, he descending, will himself
    In thunder lightning and loud trumpets’ sound
    Ordain them laws; part such as appertain
    To civil justice, part religious rites
    Of sacrifice, informing them, by types
    And shadows, of that destined seed to bruise
    The serpent, by what means he shall achieve
    Mankind’s deliverance.
    John Milton (1608–1674)