See softly, softly, catchee monkey on Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "Uncertain. Commentators refer to a variety of African languages or nations, but generally lack specific detail. Benham's Book of Quotations suggests the phrase originated from Black English, but is unclear. Compare the Wolof proverb, Ndànk-ndànk, mooy jàpp golo ci ñaay (“Slowly, slowly one catches a monkey in the forest”).\nAlthough the phrase is attested with non-standard assonant catchee mainly from the twentieth century, Eric Partridge suggests it was probably coined in the late nineteenth. Quotations from the mid-nineteenth century use catch or caught the monkey.",
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"ref": "1840, Archer Polson, James Grant, Law and Lawyers; or, Sketches and Illustrations of Legal History and Biography, London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, →OCLC:",
"text": "\"Prudens qui patiens,\" was the motto of our great Coke : a motto which the negro pithily paraphrases — \"Softly, softly, catch monkey.\"",
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"ref": "1896 March, Robert Baden-Powell, “The Native Levy in the Ashanti Expedition, 1895-96”, in Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, volume 40, London: J. J. Keliher & Co., page 305:",
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"ref": "1920, John Hargrave, The Wigwam Papers and Totem Talks, London: C. Arthur Pearson, →OCLC, page 33:",
"text": "the really important part of Scouting is to become good Scouts — \"wise old birds,\" in fact. \"Softly, softly, catchee monkey!\" Not by making a row, but by cunning and kindness",
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"ref": "1950, “Conference Conundrums”, in The Journal – Institute of Journalists, volume 38, page 148:",
"text": "Having failed to secure a Press Council of the sort they wanted, they are now trying, in a small way, to get something established — on the old principle of ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey.’",
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"ref": "2013 March 31, Gina Hoisington, “The Logic of My Anger: A Sociopath's Tale of Vengeance”, in BDSM Library:",
"text": "Softly, softly, catchee monkey, I thought to myself....slow and sure was the way with a woman like this.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-25 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-20 using wiktextract (c15a5ce and 5c11237). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
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