The sentence “My postilion has been struck by lightning,” allegedly appeared in a Hungarian phrasebook in the 1800s. Apparently it was also used in Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, and French phrasebooks, but no one has ever found a copy of a phrasebook containing this sentence, so these claims are likely apocryphal. Apocryphal or not, it’s still a great phrase and has appeared in Punch and the New Yorker and even spawned a comic poem.
PunchNew Yorker If your eye delighted in the word “nicknackatory,” that gem is from Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of Vulgar Slang. “Riding St. George,” also comes from Grose, but “diligence de Lyon,” is from Dictionnaire Érotique Moderne, by Alfred Delvau, which was published in the 1800s.
Dictionary of Vulgar Slang. Dictionnaire Érotique Moderne,
