My Postillion Has Been Struck By Lightning - Notable Sightings

Notable Sightings

In James Thurber's 1937 New Yorker article "There's No Place Like Home", a phrasebook from "the era of Imperial Russia" contains the "magnificent" line: "Oh, dear, our postillion has been struck by lightning!". Thurber speculates that such a "fantastic piece of disaster" must have been rare, "even in the days of the Czars". Thurber heard of the quote from "an writer in a London magazine".

"The Postilion Has Been Struck By Lightning" is the title of a two-stanza poem by Patricia Beer, published in 1967. The poem was later selected for inclusion in The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse. In it, the author laments the death in a thunderstorm of "the best postilion I ever had".

In 1977 actor Dirk Bogarde made use of the phrase when he titled the first volume of his autobiography A Postillion Struck By Lightning. According to Nigel Rees, Bogarde explains that while on a childhood vacation (presumably in the 1920s) he discovered an old phrase book, seemingly dating from 1898. The phrase book contained such sentences as "The muslin is too thin, have you something thicker?", "My leg, arm, foot, elbow, nose, finger is broken" and "The postillion has been struck by lightning".

In a 1995 paper, linguist David Crystal defined "postilion sentences" as "sentences introduced in teaching seem to have little or no chance of ever being used in real life". They are named after the phrase "The postilion has been struck by lightning", which Crystal describes as a famous example of such a sentence. He goes on to suggest that "an unexpectedly large number of sentences, used routinely with children with language impairment, are of this type", and gives as examples "That table's got four legs", and "Clap (your) hands!". He concludes that, "if teaching and therapeutic time is to be truly efficacious", postilion sentences should be avoided.