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Comment by DavidAdams | Hacker News Reader

Some might consider your post to be off-topic or worse a "well, actually" interjection, I found it fascinating to learn the source of the "best minds of my generation" framing. Thanks.

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I see no reason to think Ginsberg originated the phrase "best minds of a generation," but it doesn't appear cliche enough of a phrase to even have an etymology I could look up.

Yeah we shouldn't credit anyone for popularizing anything unless they were the absolute first to fathom the idea.

I can only claim to know the previous iteration. I'm sure the sentiment is actually as old as civilization its self.

I didn't say that. I didn't even suggest that he didn't create the term. I just said that there's no reason to assume, just because a phrase exists in famous work of art, that it is the origin or popularizer of the phrase. The person I was responding to said it was interesting to learn the origin of the phrase, except no one actually posted anything indicating it was the origin. It just contained it. Maybe it's the origin. I'd be interested in a good source for it. But the normal places I go to to get reliable etymologies (there are plenty of terrible sources for etymologies, unfortunately) don't have that phrase in there.

In other words, I was saying "that's a bad assumption, but I can't actually confirm or deny whether the conclusion is true."

I don't know where you or other people responding to me got the idea that I was saying anything other than exactly what I said. I'm not sure where the breakdown in meaning has occurred.

Come on. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

First, that's a different, much more specific variation that is clearly from Howl. I have heard the phrase "the best minds of a generation" in old movies and books before, but they would have been around 1950 so maybe Howl came first. Second, your link isn't actually about the Howl quote anyway, which makes me suspicious that you didn't even read the link you posted. The link investigates a quote from 2011 that contains a play on the first line of Howl and investigates that quote, not Howl, nor the phrase which appears in Howl that we're discussing.

We are discussing the quotation from 2011. See the original comment upthread which reads 'How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?'

The comment by DavidAdams to which you replied was thanking someone for mentioning the Ginsberg connection in relation to the topic under discussion, i.e. the 2011 'framing' which unambiguously draws on Ginsberg.

I think you're just making trouble, to be honest.

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