Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 May 29

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May 29

Famous quotes with name of person who made quote unknown

Let's examine the following quote:

"Everybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes!"

For your information, this quote was back in 1980 (I know the date for reasons you'll find out if you read further down) of a little boy who was a classmate of Jeremy Bem, the son of psychologist Sandra Bem. (Jeremy was born in 1976; he's referred to as Sandra's 4-year-old son.)

There are many references to this quote that can be revealed by doing a Google search; many of which are from Google Books. However, there's one thing no known source of this quote reveals; that is, the name of the boy who said this. All sources refer to him as either "the other boy" or "Jeremy's classmate".

Per my knowledge, this is a very famous quote where the name of the person who said it is unknown. Are there plenty of quotes that meet this criterion?? Georgia guy (talk) 00:07, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, there are many famous quotes with unknown authors. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 09:13, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Here is a long list of quotations whose authors are believed not to be known. --69.159.60.83 (talk) 09:42, 29 May 2016 (UTC) (by edit request) ―Mandruss ☎ 15:11, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

I think the OP is more interested in quotations that are explicitly attributed to "A Member" or "Anonymous Heckler", rather than which are merely anonymous. "How many toes has a pig?" is a well-known example - is there a list out there of such quotations? Tevildo (talk) 16:44, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

The World Firsts Page

As I remember,there was a page on Wikipedia that told about the countries extremes listed in a table such as Turkey being the first in Hazelnut production,Zimbabwe having the worst inflation and so on. What was the name of that page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by KaptaşHero (talk • contribs) 08:19, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps that page was deleted as a mishmash. Category:Lists of worsts and Category:Lists of superlatives are worth checking. Brandmeister^talk 16:11, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

There are pages on the internet like most googled item per country. In Brazil, it's "prostitute", in Canada, "passport". μηδείς (talk) 18:41, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

That isn't published research. It's a promotional stunt by the web site "fixr.com", apparently based on Google autocomplete results for the English phrase "how much does * cost in [country]". So I don't think Brazilians are searching for prostitutes; maybe English-speaking tourists are, but even that's dubious, since Google autocomplete results are infamously crazy. -- BenRG (talk) 04:11, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

The page was given as an example, not to make an argument. I have seen many other such maps, but that was the first one I came acrost in my search, and I mentioned Canada and Brazil since the point size in those cases was large enough to read easily. μηδείς (talk) 17:34, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

List of top international rankings by country nevermind it was this page after all. KaptaşHero (talk) 18:10, 30 May 2016 (UTC)