How certain are you about how good he is?

posted: 2008-10-16 15:42:15 perma-link, RSS comments feed

"For he's a jolly good fellow!
For he's a jolly good fellow!
For he's a jolly good fellow, which nobody can deny!"

That's how that song goes here in the U.S. That final clause is meant to add a sense of absolute certainty to the assertion the 'he' is indeed a jolly good fellow. But in England, the final clause is sung as "And so say all of us", which is much more of a qualifier. It's basically equivalent to saying "As far as we can tell."

But what if your belief that someone is jolly good falls somewhere between mere opinion and absolute truth? I'd like to propose the ending "And wikipedia agrees." This would require that the person have a wikipedia entry. Should we start listing jolly good fellows at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_good_fellows ?

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