Lotteries Are Taxing

Another quote I have to bother a librarian about: "Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math." Or perhaps, "...who flunked math."

William Safire again wrote the On Language column in the New York Times this Sunday. I've seen fewer columns of his in the NYT Magazine this year, and I miss his straightforward premise for all his articles. He takes sayings that have shown up in the news and parses them for meaning and etymology. His style is a bit witty without being too clever.

My curiousity about quotes was probably fueled by reading On Language. If only I had access to LexisNexis through work, too.


Anyway, back to the quote:

Some sites attribute the quote to Monique Lloyd. She's a mother who, not approving of the local public schools, has been involved in home-schooling for years. A web search of her name brings up quite a few home-school&emdash;related sites.

The site Basic Quotations has the quote attributed to one Roger Jones. But who's he? A retired information engineer who knows a thing or two about mathematically rigorous logic? An IT consultant in London? I've been looking, and I still don't know.

And again, Bartlett's and other quote books have been no help. Another thing to bother the librarians.

[]