I'm new to the forum, so forgive me if this is a repeat. I received an email today with the following :"As Ben Franklin said: In wine there is wisdom,in beer there is freedom,in water there is bacteria." I'm pretty sure Ben Franklin didn't say this, since the term "bacteria" was first used in the 19th century. Anyone know where this one originated?
Thanks.

There are two potential sources according to http://hop-talk.com/2008/01/09/help-me-f...

One is that David Auerbach said it and the other claims that it was an old German saying. Of course, this quote might not be the exact wording because the term "bacteria" certainly didn't exist back then.

"http://www.foodreference.com/html/qba... has the quote has ‘”In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria.” - David Auerbach, 2002"

"A quick search of Usenet archives shows a person named Wayne Lutz using it in his signature in 1996. He lists it thus:
“In beer there is strength,
In wine is wisdom,
In water is bacteria.” - Olde German saying."
http://answers.yahoo.com/quest...0080202191255AA9bqik

Whoever wrote this must have borrowed it from Pliny (who ever Pliny was)and expanded it.

In wine there is truth. (In vino veritas.)
--Pliny, Historia naturalis

As a matter of record I prefer freedom before wisdom.

Most of Ben Franklin's sayings were "borrowed" from ancient wisdom.

This one hasn't been mentioned:

quote:

In Vine Veritas (In wine there is wisdom)
In Cervesio Felicitas (In beer there is joy)
~ Latin expression of unknown origins

"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed - Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, ‘It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver'."
-Deep Thought, Jack Handy

Thanks, everyone! I think this must be a case of later wags adding onto previous tidbits of wisdom.

It goes all the way back before Pliny, at least the wine part, among the fragments of Alcaeus, a Greek poet from Lesbos in the sixth century BC who wrote lyric poetry. oinos kai alathea, "wine and truth" used to be on my signature.

Pliny (in this case, Pliny the Elder) is clearly quoting a Latin version of Alcaeus's maxim. Since the Romans basically copied their system of education from the Greeks, a highly educated Roman like Pliny is guaranteed to have read Alcaeus, since Alcaeus was one of the "canon" of lyric poets widely read in schools.

By the way, veritas is better translated "truth" than wisdom. Perhaps in Franklin's day the meanings of "truth" and "wisdom" overlapped more than, but in today's English "truth" is a better choice.

Alcaeus, as I said earlier, has come down to us only in fragments. We know "oinos kai alathea"--wine and truth--from an ancient scholar who wrote a commentary on Plato's Symposium that was itself preserved in the margins of a later Plato manuscript. At 217e Alcibiades has just begun his wine-soaked encomium on Socrates, and uses the saying to justify the part of his tale that comes next. At this point the ancient scholar wrote: paroimia oinos kai alathea, epi ton en methe ten aletheian legonton. esti de aismatos Alkaiou arche: oinos, o phile pai, kai alathea. kai Theokritos. ("The proverb "wine and truth" concerns those who tell the truth in their cups. It is the opening of a song of Alcaeus: Wine, my dear boy, and truth. And Theocritus uses it too.") [Fragment 366 Lobel-Page]

It is a sentiment that Alcaeus returned to a lot. We have it in another form [Fr. 333 Lobel-Page]: oinos gar anthropoi dioptron ("for wine is a peephole into a man").

It passed down the generations of Greek poets. About a hundred years later Theognis of Megara uses it in one of his elegies, of which we have significant scraps, more than of Alcaeus [Theognis 500]: andros d' oinos edeixe noon ("wine shows the mind of a man"). And 400 years after Theognis, as our scholiast points out, Theocritus of Syracuse uses it--in nearly its original form--to justify a poem in which he pours out his heart to a lover (Idyll 29.1).

And 300 years after Theocritus the proverb finds its way into Pliny the Elder in the form in vino veritas. As I said earlier, educated Romans of the wealthy class had been brought up on a diet of Greek authors, albeit mostly for the purpose of burnishing their oratorical skills (the Sophists won the debate, for the Romans). Those who weren't educated would still have heard of it indirectly: the first Latin tragedy was put on about 238 BC, written by Livius Andronicus, a Greek ex-slave. By the time we get to Pliny the Elder in the first century AD, the bulk of Greek literature had been digested into Latin one way or another.

thanks for the information

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