From: khematite@gmail.com   
      
   On Saturday, 15 October 2022 at 07:17:50 UTC-4, Hoyle Kiger wrote:   
   > On Sunday, July 9, 2017 at 3:11:07 PM UTC-5, khematite wrote:    
   > > On Sunday, 9 July 2017 15:44:36 UTC-4, luisb...@aol.com wrote:    
   > > > Bob Dylan asked his Paris audience whether it's true that "one Frenchman   
   is worth a thousand lives." Where does that come from?    
   > > Google it and you only get two hits, both of which are references to   
   Dylan's having said it during his 1966 Paris concert. I'd guess that in   
   Dylan's mental state during that concert he somewhat mangled the original   
   phrase "A thousand Frenchmen can't    
   be wrong." That phrase had also appeared over the years as "Ten thousand   
   Frenchmen can't be wrong" and "Fifty thousand Frenchmen can't be wrong." In   
   1927, Sophie Tucker's hit song codified the phrase as "Fifty million Frenchmen   
   Can't Be Wrong," and was    
   followed by the 1929 Herbert Fields-Cole Porter Broadway musical with the same   
   title.    
   > >    
   > > In 1959, RCA Victor borrowed the phrase for Elvis' second album of gold   
   records, titled "50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong."   
   > I would say it's more likely Dylan knew exactly what he was saying and   
   parlayed the expression into an attempt to compliment the French, perhaL   
      
      
   Looking back on this thread five years later, I have to wonder whether Dylan   
   wasn't just twitting his French audience in response to its apparent hostility   
   to him.  Perhaps he was making the point (rather hyperbolically--the ratio   
   obviously wasn't 1000:1)   
    that a lot of American lives had to be sacrificed to liberate France in World   
   War II--by some estimates, nearly 30,000, in fact. The war , of course, had   
   ended only twenty years earlier and was a lot fresher in people's minds at   
   that point. That     
   explanation would also tie in Dylan's remark to the gigantic American flag   
   displayed behind him on the Paris stage.    
      
   From Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America:   
      
   "…the curtains part, and there they see to their horror, attached to the   
   backdrop, the emblem of everything they are coming to hate, the emblem of   
   napalm and Coca-Cola and white racism and colonialism and imagination’s   
   death. It is a huge fifty-star    
   American flag. And Bob Dylan, the emblem of American rebellion and   
   imagination’s rebirth, has hoisted it aloft.   
      
   "Was it a joke? But it is no joke…this Stars and Stripes stuff turns a   
   musical challenge into an assault, an incitement…In England, the idol had   
   traded  insults with the hecklers, but in Paris, on this, his twenty-fifth   
   birthday, he strikes first."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)