There are ideas that get passed around like comic books. People see them and go, "That's interesting," and "Can I have a copy? or "I know someone who will find this interesting too." These days, with e-mail, and bulk copy-forwarding, it's even easier for a snappy idea to get around.

I first created this in August 1989.

Only I can tell you the way to do this now.
I only can tell you the way to do this now.
I can only tell you the way to do this now.
I can tell only you the way to do this now.
I can tell you only the way to do this now.
I can tell you the only way to do this now.
I can tell you the way to only do this now.
I can tell you the way to do only this now.
I can tell you the way to do this only now.

I did it in front of 90-or-so people, in the first week of the Master track held at the Holiday Inn, South Circle, San Diego, in that year, and it was in response to a question from the audience - a black lady doctor, a surgeon I think she was, and she had stuck her hand up and asked: what did I mean by "scope"?

Now, the trick with the kind of intensive, 12-day, eight-hours-a-day show we were running, where Richard wanted me and him both to keep it fast and fun and moving, is not to get sucked into academic discussions, and long, wordy debates, and foozles about definitions - the kind of thing that only feeds the auditory digital, and leaves everybody else cold. So I said, if y'all go right into the exercise, I'll have something for you later - if not by the end of the exercise, then after the break.

I wanted an example that everybody would get, some raw experience - not a buncha long words with a Flesch-Kincaid index of 90. I wanted them to get the intuitive idea of "scope".

By the time they came back from coffee, I had come up with, and written out, the above. And because each day's exercises and flip-chart points were being typed right into an early Apple Mac as they were being given, that original, nine-line example made its way into everybody's manual too. (Each day's pages were printed out and xeroxed overnite, and handed out next morning, to go in the folders each student had been given at the start of the course.)

The next time I saw this pattern was five years later, and by then, it had become:

(a) Only I will treat the patient in my office tomorrow.
(b) I only will treat the patient in my office tomorrow.
(c) I will only treat the patient in my office tomorrow.
(d) I will treat only the patient in my office tomorrow.
(e) I will treat the only patient in my office tomorrow.
(f) I will treat the patient only in my office tomorrow.
(g) I will treat the patient in only my office tomorrow.
(h) I will treat the patient in my only office tomorrow.
(i) I will treat the patient in my office only tomorrow.
(j) I will treat the patient in my office tomorrow only.

This was in a book, The Psychologist's Companion, by a noted American psychologist, Robert Sternberg (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1993, p71.)

If I'm being charitable, I'd say Mr Sternberg did not get any crediting info with the version he first saw, so just to be on the safe side, he re-worded it, thus avoiding breach of copyright. From someone of his stature, I would expect no less. But the idea wasn't his.

I've seen the thing repeated a few times since, squeezed into this person's manual, added to that person's manual, or floating around on its own, always uncredited. The latest occasion was on the Comment page, p32, of The Observer, last Sunday (18th Nov, 2007), where it had been offered as an entry to the latest edition of The Observer Style Guide. Readers had been asked by the Readers' Editor, Stephen Pritchard, to send in suggestions for inclusion, and a Mr Robin Keable sent in this:

Only the bishop gave the gorilla the bun.
The only bishop gave the gorilla the bun.
The bishop only gave the gorilla the bun.
The bishop gave only the gorilla the bun.
The bishop gave the only gorilla the bun.
The bishop gave the gorilla only the bun.
The bishop gave the gorilla the only bun.

I have exchanged e-mails with Stephen Pritchard, and he tells me that Mr Keable did not know the attribution of this language feature, but thought "it has been around a long time". Whether the style guide will take my word for it, and say where it first came from, who knows (there is a video-tape somewhere, which the FBI CSI labs could certify as untampered with, so provenance is surely beyond doubt) ….

But it got me thinking, there's been plenty of "ideas diffusion" in nlp - more than enough examples of ideas travelling on, sometimes inside nlp, sometimes "across the border" to the world outside nlp, but often with the credit being deleted, or just "accidentally" falling off. So I thought I would have some fun with this, and call for entries in the "Where Did This Come From?" game.

Two kinds of entries are invited:

1. Hand-outs you've seen on several courses - each one with a different "by-line" (funnily enough, it's usually the promoter of the course). The aim will be to say which one is the earliest, and true-est one.

2. Hand-outs which are "orphans" - that is they have no credit, no mummy and daddy, at all … and you would like to know: where did this one come from?

I'm happy to make a few judgements in the first instance, but if Messrs Altfeld, Bradbury, Perez, and Tsakalos want to join in as arbiters, so much the better.

Eric.