Quote Origin: Time Flies Like an Arrow; Fruit Flies Like a Banana

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Groucho Marx? Anthony Oettinger? Susumu Kuno? Anonymous?

Question for Quote Investigator: The simile “Time flies like an arrow” compares the rapidity of the passage of time to the quickness of a darting arrow. However, there exist alternative interpretations of the phrase. Here are two possibilities:

(1) A particular type of flies called “time flies” are fond of arrows.

(2) The technique used to measure the speed of flies should be same one used to measure the speed of an arrow.

The humor of the following quip is based on the juxtaposition of two phrases with divergent interpretations:

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

This line has been attributed to the famous comedian Groucho Marx, but I have never seen a solid citation. Would you please explore this topic?

Reply from Quote Investigator: QI has not yet found any substantive evidence that Groucho Marx used the comical line under examination. He died in 1977, and he received credit for the line by 1989. See the citation given further below.

In November 1963 the “Harvard Alumni Bulletin” reported on the research of faculty members Anthony Oettinger and Susumu Kuno who were attempting to create a computer program to help automate the task of language translation. The task was more difficult than early researchers anticipated. Boldface added to excepts by QI:1

Unfortunately, there are many English sentences that humans understand in a unique way but that machines find highly ambiguous. For example: “Time flies like an arrow.” Your English grammarian sees that “Time” is the subject of the verb “flies,” and the verb is modified by the adverbial phrase “like an arrow.” The computer will diagram the sentence in this way too; but being very literal-minded, it will also provide several other parsings.

The bulletin discussed alternative parsings which corresponded to the interpretations of the type presented at the beginning of this article:

For example, it would also parse the sentence as though its meaning were (1) “Determine the speed of flies as quickly as you can;” and (2) “A species of fly, called time flies, enjoy an arrow.”

The bulletin continued with a discussion of the computer program used for parsing:2

These possibilities do not make much sense to a human; but they are syntactically correct, and the computer blindly produces all of these simply because it has not been taught, for example, that there is no such species of fly as “time flies.” The computer could be “trained,” of course, not to parse such a sentence the way it did . But then the machine could not correctly handle a sentence like “Fruit flies like bananas.”

Thus, the article in the “Harvard Alumni Bulletin” contained the two phrases: “Time flies like an arrow” and “Fruit flies like bananas”. However, the sentences were not placed adjacent to one another, and they were not intended to produce laughter. QI believes both sentences were supplied to the bulletin journalist by the researchers Anthony Oettinger and Susumu Kuno.

In September 1966 Oettinger published an article in “Scientific American” magazine that employed the two phrases: “Time flies like an arrow” and “Fruit flies like a banana”.3

The slight alteration in the latter phrase produced a closer parallel structure. The two sentences were used to illustrate the ambiguity of language. The sentences were not placed adjacent to one another in the text.

Many years later in 1982 a message in the Usenet newsgroup net.jokes mentioned a gag that was already circulating which used the examples given during linguistics research in the 1960s:4

Seen on a bathroom wall:
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

This was the earliest close match for the joke known to QI. The creator remains anonymous although QI believes that the inspiration can be traced to the research efforts of Anthony Oettinger and Susumu Kuno.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

In 1690 the simile about time appeared in a religious book titled “The Pleasure of the Mind; Or, the Foretast of Happiness”:5

… for the time flies away as swift as a Bird of the Air, or as an Arrow out of a Bow.

In 1816 the precise expression “Time flies like an arrow” appeared in “The Infidel’s Text-Book, Being the Substance of Thirteen Lectures on the Bible” by Robert Cooper who described the following statement as a Chinese proverb:6

“Time flies like an arrow; days and months like a weaver’s shuttle.”

The phrase “time flies” is ambiguous. In 1903 a linguistic puzzle appeared in “The Royal Magazine” which asked readers to add punctuation to a sentence to clarify its meaning:7

Time flies you cannot they pass at such irregular intervals.
or:
Time flies; you cannot; they pass at such irregular intervals.

(“Time,” of course, being used in the sense of timing a race, and “flies” being the well-known summer insects.)

The ambiguity of “time flies” discussed in 1903 prefigured the discussion of syntax and semantics in the 1960s. A separate Quote Investigator article about the puzzle above is available here.

In 1930 “Boys’ Life” magazine transformed the puzzle into a joke:8

SCOUTMASTER: Time flies.
SMART TENDERFOOT: You can’t. They go too fast.

Kuno and Oettinger published a paper in a conference held November 12 to 14, 1963 which was sponsored by AFIPS, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. They discussed their work on the computer analysis of English syntax. Neither of the two sentences pertinent to the joke under exploration appeared in the article. The researchers did mention “They are flying planes” and “Time passes, and the world changes”:9

On November 23, 1963 the “Harvard Alumni Bulletin” published an article about the research of Kuno and Oettinger containing the two phrases: “Time flies like an arrow” and “Fruit flies like bananas” as mentioned previously.

On November 30, 1963 “The Science News Letter” published a piece about the work of Kuno and Oettinger. The phrase with “time” and “arrow” was present; however, the phrase with “fruit flies” and  “banana(s)” was absent.10

In March 1964 Oettinger delivered a report to the U.S. National Science Foundation. He was the Principal Investigator of a grant obtained from the agency. The report included a chapter by Kuno. The phrase with “fruit flies” and “banana(s)” was absent. The report used the following sentence with a conjunction:11

TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW AND THEY ARE FLYING PLANES.

In May 1964 “Fortune” magazine published “Machines That Man Can Talk With” by John Pfeiffer which included a discussion of Kuno and Oettinger’s work. The two key phrases of the joke were present, but they were not adjacent:12

“Time flies like an arrow” may seem fairly straightforward to us, but a machine sees a number of other possibilities—for example, “Time the speed of flies as quickly as you can” (“time” being interpreted as a verb rather than a noun) and “Certain flies enjoy an arrow” (“time” being interpreted as an adjective, and “like” being interpreted as a verb). The machine could be instructed to rule out these particular offbeat parsings, but how would it handle the sentence, “Fruit flies like bananas”? Problems of semantics continue to plague investigators concerned with advanced man-machine communications.

In September 1966 Oettinger published an article in “Scientific American”:13

A grammar that pretends to describe English at all accurately must yield a structure for “Time flies like an arrow” in which “time” is the subject of the verb “flies” and “like an arrow” is an adverbial phrase modifying the verb.

Oettinger described unusual interpretations of the sentence, e.g., a type of flies called “time flies” consider an arrow to be a tasty meal. Oettinger stated that a computer program could be designed to discard those interpretations, but it was dangerous to limit the program. Oettinger presented the example with “fruit flies” and the singular “banana”:

A point can be made that the structures are legitimate even if the sentences are meaningless. It is, after all, only an accident of nature, or for that matter merely of nomenclature, that there is no species of flies called “time flies.” Worse yet, anything ruling out the nonexisting species of time flies will also rule out the identical but legitimate structure of “Fruit flies like a banana.”

In 1970 the two phrases appeared in the introduction to the book “Human and Artificial Intelligence” by Frederick J. Crosson:14

For example, consider the sentence “Time flies like an arrow.” The word ‘time’ here may be either a noun, an adjective, or a verb, yielding three different syntactical interpretations. (To see how it could be the latter two, which are less perspicuous perhaps, compare: “fruit flies like a banana” and “time runners with a stop-watch.”)

In 1982 the joke under analysis appeared within a message posted to the Usenet newsgroup net.jokes:15

Seen on a bathroom wall:
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

Shortly afterwards a message appeared in net.jokes which discounted the humor:16

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”

That’s no joke — it’s a paradigm for the difficulty of natural language processing. Reminds me of an early (50’s) experiment in word-for-word translation. “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”, when translated from English to Russian and back, came out “the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten”.

In 1989 a message in the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.mac attributed the joke to Groucho Marx:17

* +++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ * *
* + + + + * “Time flies like an arrow, *
* + + +++ +++ * fruit flies like a banana.” *
* + + + + * —- Groucho Marx *
* +++++ +++++ + + * *

In 1992 a message in the Usenet newsgroup alt.stupidity also credited Groucho Marx:18

For those of you stoopid folks out there who don’t know, this is a quotation from Groucho Marx. The exact wording, I believe, was

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

In conclusion, during the 1960s the researchers Anthony Oettinger and Susumu Kuno employed the two sentences under examination in their reports to help explain linguistic ambiguity. The researchers did not place the sentences adjacent. By 1982 an anonymous person combined the sentences to create a jest. The ascription to Groucho Marx is currently unsupported.

The simile “Time flies like an arrow” has a long history as indicated by the 1690 and 1816 citations above. But the companion sentence “Fruit flies like bananas” (or “Fruit flies like a banana”) may have been crafted by Kuno or Oettinger. QI has found no earlier matches for the two sentences employed as a pair.

Image Notes: Illustration of Neon arrows from Charlota Blunarova at Unsplash together with a picture of a banana from Mockup Graphics at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and retouched.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to David Wilton and the Firestone Library of Princeton University for providing scans of the crucial 1963 article in the “Harvard Alumni Bulletin”. Also, thanks to Bill Mullins for pointing to “Fortune” magazine. Additional thanks to Ben Zimmer who pointed to the “AFIPS” citation and other citations. Further thanks to mailing list discussants John Baker, Barbara Need, Arnold Zwicky, Barry Popik, Douglas Wilson, Ron Butters, Joel S. Berson. Laurence Horn, Victor Steinbok, Margaret Lee, Damien Hall,  David Daniel, Fred Shapiro, Seán Fitzpatrick. Lastly, thanks to the volunteer editors of Wikipedia who pointed to the “Boys’ Life” citation.

Update History: On October 9, 2023 the article was rewritten. Several citations were added to the article including ones dated 1690, 1816, 1903, 1930, 1963, 1982, and 1992. On March 13, 2025 the format of the bibliographical notes was updated.

  1. 1963 November 23, Harvard Alumni Bulletin, Grammar by Computer, Start Page 204, Quote Page 204 and 205, Harvard Alumni Association, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  2. 1963 November 23, Harvard Alumni Bulletin, Grammar by Computer, Start Page 204, Quote Page 205, Harvard Alumni Association, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  3. 1966 September, Scientific American, Volume 215, Number 3, The Uses of Computers in Science by Anthony Oettinger, Start Page 160, Quote Page 168, Scientific American Inc., New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  4. Usenet discussion message, Timestamp: Sep 7, 1982, 9:45:58 PM, Newsgroup: net.jokes, From: mork-cb!willy, Subject: Time flies… (Google Groups Search; Accessed September 23, 2023) link ↩︎
  5. 1690, The Pleasure of the Mind; Or, the Foretast of Happiness. Section: To Show the Dextrious Excellency of our Religion, Christian, upon St. John, Chap. 8. Ver. 34, Start Page 233, Quote Page 236, Printed, Sold by Randal Taylor, near Stationers-Hall, London. (Google Books Full View) link ↩︎
  6. 1816, The Infidel’s Text-Book, Being the Substance of Thirteen Lectures on the Bible by Robert Cooper, Lecture 13: Morality Without the Bible, Quote Page 192, Printed by R. Johnson, Hull, England. (Google Books Full View) link ↩︎
  7. 1903 January, The Royal Magazine, Volume 9, Number 51, Mr. X — His Pages, Cryptic Sentences, Quote Page 299, Column 1, C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., London, England. (Google Books Full View) link ↩︎
  8. 1930 February, Boys’ Life, Think and Grin, Edited by Francis J. Rigney, Quote Page 48, Column 3, Published by Boy Scouts of America, New York. (Google Books Full View) link ↩︎
  9. 1963 November, AFIPS 1963 (Fall): Proceedings of the November 12-14, 1963, Fall Joint Computer Conference, Article: Syntactic Structure and Ambiguity of English by Susumu Kuno and Anthony G. Oettinger (Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts), Start Page 397, Quote Page 407, AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies. (ACM Digital Library) link ↩︎
  10. 1963 November 30, The Science News Letter, Volume 84, Number 22, Harvard Computer Finds English Language Fuzzy, Quote Page 346, Column 3, Society for Science & the Public. (JSTOR) link ↩︎
  11. 1964 March, Report Number NSF-13, Mathematical Linguistics and Automatic Translation,  Report to The National Science Foundation, Principal Investigator: Anthony G. Oettinger, XI. New Techniques for Repetitive Path Elimination by Susumu Kuno, Start Page XI-1, Quote Page XI-15, The Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts. (Google Books Full View) link ↩︎
  12. 1964 May, Fortune, Machines That Man Can Talk With by John Pfeiffer, Start Page 153, Quote Page 194, (Series: Part III: The Boundless Age of the Computer), Time Inc., Chicago, Illinois. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  13. 1966 September, Scientific American, Volume 215, Number 3, The Uses of Computers in Science by Anthony Oettinger, Start Page 160, Quote Page 168, Scientific American Inc., New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  14. 1970, Human and Artificial Intelligence, Edited by Frederick J. Crosson (University of Notre Dame), Section: Introduction, Quote Page 15, Appleton-Century-Crofts, Educational Division Meredith Corporation, New York. (Verified with hardcopy and scans) ↩︎
  15. Usenet discussion message, Timestamp: Sep 7, 1982, 9:45:58 PM, Newsgroup: net.jokes, From: mork-cb!willy, Subject: Time flies… (Google Groups Search; Accessed September 23, 2023) link ↩︎
  16. Usenet discussion message, Timestamp: Sep 8, 1982, 11:07:58 PM, Newsgroup: net.jokes, From: whuxlb!ech, Subject: Time flies… – (nf). (Google Groups Search; Accessed October 9, 2023) link ↩︎
  17. Usenet discussion message, Timestamp: Aug 3, 1989, 5:16:23 PM, Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac, From: Brian Moore, Subject: Introductory C Books. (Google Groups Search; Accessed Sept 23, 2023) link ↩︎
  18. Usenet discussion message, Timestamp: Aug 18, 1992, 1:18:57 PM, Newsgroup: alt.stupidity, From: James Cherry, Subject: Really, Really Dumb. (Google Groups Search; Accessed September 23, 2023) link ↩︎