The say of the week

I used to keep a web page with my stuff, on home.fnal.gov, a site owned by the Fermilab laboratory. I had a cool little box in the page, titled "The say of the week". I collected there sentences which I found amusing, and a new one made it there each week.

Then, one day, I put there a link: "this week's say is brought to you by G.B*** senior! Click to get it!". If you clicked on it, you saw the pic, where he was showing an eloquent finger pointing up. The picture had a sentence below it: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the b***" - asterisks were not there then.

A few days later, my site was obscured, and I was told some taxpayer had complained about improper use of DoE funds. I had to show I felt sorry for the mishap, and the say of the week was gone for good.

A couple of years later, I reinstalled the whole site in a Padova University site (Italians are much looser on these sorts of things), and I happily reinstated everything. But by then I had too many things to take care of, and there have since been very few additions to my little list.

Starting this week, I've decided I am going to recycle the sentences I had there. I will be more cautious, since the site before you, dear reader, is no less public-owned than the one which gave me trouble. But now, without further ado, here is this week's say:

"I believe sex is the most beautiful, natural and pure thing money can buy" (Steve Martin).

Comments

[Tommaso Dorigo]

After posting this, I paused for a sec to think of using the word "say" for a sentence. I could not remember any instance of it in the literature (my vocabulary is a collage of classical British English studies and on-the-road practice of American English).
I decided that I could not afford to make such a mistake, and went on to look for "say" on the Webster's dictionary in my laptop. No description of the word seemed to fit the use of "say" in a phrase such as "say of the week". So I made a search with google: got many hits, but, on a careful inspection, all of them were actual typos! It turns out that the letter "S" is very close to "D" in american keyboards!
However, I did find what I was looking for in the Merriam-Webster online (http://www.merriam-webster.com)in the end: "say" is indeed archaic for sentence, something no doubt stuck to my mind sometime in the past while reading some classics...
So I can go to sleep happy now.