Lexical Leavings 23

	Lexical Leavings by Tom Gally
	Thinking about the penchant of English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries for ghost English proverbs--many of which are obscure English quotations that someone scrounged up years ago and forcibly attached to Japanese proverbs--I started wondering how many new, often repeated English proverbs are making it into the dictionaries. For example: No woman can be too rich or too thin. In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes. God is in the details. No good deed goes unpunished. I checked three large, recently published English-Japanese dictionaries, and none listed any of these proverbs. (Another example of a similar expression appears at 83.) Perhaps my greatest contribution as a lexicographer so far is to have added to a Japanese-English dictionary, as a translation of 十人十色, "Different strokes for different folks." (January 14, 2003)