Origins of the phrase extraordinary fellow in literature AI-pedia

"Extraordinary fellow" is an English phrase. It describes a man, or sometimes any person, as remarkable, unusual or out of the ordinary. It has been common in British and American English since at least the 19th century, both in speech and in fiction. Its tone varies with context. It can express plain admiration, affectionate amusement or polite bewilderment. Longer forms such as "you are a very special, extraordinary fellow" are often asked about as if they were quotations from a particular book.

No single, famous literary source for the phrase has been identified. It is not a coined expression with a known author. It is a natural combination of two ordinary English words, and many writers have used it independently. Several well-known works are still often named as its origin. They include Astrid Lindgren's Karlsson-on-the-Roof books, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and biographical writing about the physicist Richard Feynman. When these claims are checked against the texts, most turn out to be paraphrases, mistranslations, confusions with other lines, or claims that cannot be confirmed.

This article covers the history of the two words, the ways the phrase has been used, the attributions commonly made, and the reasons quotations of this kind become attached to famous works and people.

Overview

People who ask where a phrase "comes from" may mean either of two things. They may mean the history of the words: when they entered English and how their meanings changed. Or they may mean the first famous use: a particular book, speech or character with which the phrase is linked.

For "extraordinary fellow", the first question has a clear answer, because both words are well documented in historical dictionaries. The second question has no clear answer. The phrase appears in a great many texts, and none of them is generally accepted as its source. Claims that a particular author "originated" it are best treated as unproven unless they come with an exact citation, meaning a named edition and a page or chapter.

The fuller form "a very special extraordinary fellow" is more distinctive. A wording that specific might be expected to trace back to one text. However, no reliable published source using that exact wording is known. The phrase is more likely a modern paraphrase that merges several ideas: being "special" (a common word in modern children's books and affirmations), being "extraordinary", and being a "fellow".

History of the words

"Fellow"

"Fellow" entered late Old English as fēolaga, a borrowing from Old Norse félagi. The Norse word was built from fé, meaning property, livestock or money, and a root related to "lay". A félagi was originally someone who laid down money in a shared venture: a business partner or comrade. The Norse influence came from Scandinavian settlement in England during the Viking Age.

In Middle English the meaning widened. "Fellow" came to mean a companion, an equal or one of a pair. Several later senses grew from this:

• An equal or match, as in "without fellow" (without equal). This sense survives in "fellow citizens" and "fellow travellers".
• A member of a body, such as a fellow of a college or of a learned society.
• A man in general. From about the 16th century "fellow" was used for any man, often a social inferior. It could be contemptuous, as in Shakespeare's frequent use of "fellow" for servants and low characters.
• A friendly or approving term, especially in set phrases such as "good fellow", "fine fellow", "jolly good fellow" and "old fellow".

By the 19th century, "fellow" was a standard informal word for a man in British English. It was roughly comparable to later "chap" or "guy". It could be warm, neutral or slightly condescending, depending on the adjective attached to it.

"Extraordinary"

"Extraordinary" comes from Latin extraordinarius, from the phrase extra ordinem, "outside the order" or "outside the usual course". It entered English in the late Middle English period, in the 15th century.

Its earliest English senses were largely technical and neutral. Something extraordinary was additional to, or outside, the regular arrangement. This older sense survives in official titles such as "ambassador extraordinary" and "envoy extraordinary", meaning a diplomat sent on a special mission. It also survives in "extraordinary general meeting", meaning a meeting called outside the normal schedule.

The sense "remarkable, exceptional, astonishing" developed alongside the technical sense and later became the main everyday meaning. Even in this sense the word can be ambiguous. Something extraordinary may be extraordinarily good, extraordinarily strange or simply unusual. The word does not by itself say whether the unusualness is welcome.

The combination

Putting the two words together produces a phrase with a built-in ambiguity. That ambiguity explains much of its literary usefulness. "He is an extraordinary fellow" can mean any of the following:

• sincere praise: the man is exceptionally talented, brave or kind;
• affectionate exasperation: the man is eccentric, reckless or impossible to predict, but liked;
• guarded or ironic comment: the speaker finds the man baffling or suspect but is too polite to say so directly.

In 19th- and early 20th-century British fiction, the phrase often appears in the second and third senses. This fits a register sometimes described as British understatement, in which strong feelings are expressed through mild or deliberately vague words. A character calling another "an extraordinary fellow" may be signalling, without saying it outright, that the man is a genius, a lunatic or both.

Because the phrase was so ordinary in this period, its appearances in individual novels, stories and memoirs are rarely notable in themselves. Searching large digitised book collections finds it in many authors' work. No author has a recognised claim to it.

Commonly proposed sources

Several specific origins are regularly suggested for "extraordinary fellow" and its longer variants. The main ones are assessed below. In each case the question is whether the phrase actually appears in the work, or whether the work has been linked to it by association.

Astrid Lindgren's Karlsson-on-the-Roof

The Swedish author Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002) wrote three books about Karlsson, a small, plump, boastful man with a propeller on his back who lives in a little house on a Stockholm rooftop. The first, Lillebror och Karlsson på taket, was published in 1955. Karlsson befriends a boy known as Lillebror ("little brother"), and much of the comedy comes from Karlsson's unlimited self-praise.

Karlsson does have well-known self-descriptions, and these have become catchphrases in Swedish and in many translations. The best known are:

• calling himself "världens bästa Karlsson", "the world's best Karlsson";
• describing himself as "a handsome, thoroughly clever and perfectly plump man in his prime" (in Swedish, roughly "en stilig, genomklok och lagom tjock man i sina bästa år"). The wording differs slightly between translations.

These lines are close in spirit to "an extraordinary fellow": they are comic claims to being uniquely wonderful. However, the specific wordings sometimes cited as Karlsson quotations, such as "en alldeles speciell och märkvärdig herre" in Swedish or "ein ganz besonderer, außergewöhnlicher Kerl" in German, cannot be confirmed as standard text from the books. They appear to be paraphrases or back-translations rather than verified quotations. Lindgren's books have been translated into many languages, often more than once, so a particular translator may have used similar wording somewhere. Without a cited edition, though, the attribution remains unconfirmed.

The safest summary is this: Karlsson is a famous literary example of a character who presents himself as an extraordinary fellow, but he is not a verified source of the English phrase or its fuller "very special" form.

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit

The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), was first published in 1937. It ends with a short exchange between the wizard Gandalf and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo remarks that the old prophecies have come true and that he had a part in it. Gandalf replies, in the line usually quoted:

"You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!"

(The word order is "only quite a little fellow". It is sometimes misquoted as "only a quite little fellow" or "only a little fellow".)

This is probably the best-known passage in English children's literature that combines warm praise of a character with the word "fellow". It is easy to see how a half-remembered version could become "you are a very special fellow". But Gandalf's meaning is close to the opposite of "extraordinary". He is gently reminding Bilbo that he is small and that larger forces have been at work. The line is a source of confusion, not an origin.

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows (1908), by the Scottish-born writer Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932), features Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. Toad is wealthy, vain, impulsive and obsessed with fads, above all motor cars. His friends Ratty (the Water Rat), Mole and Badger treat him with a mix of affection, despair and exasperation. In one passage Rat describes Toad as good-natured and affectionate, perhaps not very clever, possibly boastful and conceited, but having "some great qualities".

Toad is in many ways the classic "extraordinary fellow" of Edwardian fiction: lovable, maddening and impossible to restrain. The phrase fits the book's tone and period exactly. However, a specific passage in which Ratty or Badger calls Toad "an extraordinary fellow" in those words could not be confirmed for this article. The association may come from the general character of the book, from stage and screen adaptations (A. A. Milne's play Toad of Toad Hall, 1929, and several later films and television series), or from paraphrase. Readers wanting a firm citation should check the original text, which is in the public domain and freely available in digitised form.

Richard Feynman and his father

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was an American theoretical physicist and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. In his memoir-style writings, especially the chapter "The Making of a Scientist" in What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), he describes how his father, Melville Feynman, shaped his way of thinking. Biographies, including James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), discuss the same relationship.

Feynman's well-known accounts include:

• his father reading to him from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and translating the facts into vivid terms. For example, he explained how large a dinosaur would be by comparing it with their own house and window.
• his father teaching him that knowing the name of a bird in many languages tells you nothing about the bird itself. What matters is watching what the bird does. Feynman presented this as the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

These stories show a father who treated his son as a partner in understanding the world rather than as a pupil to be drilled. That idea fits loosely with praising a child as an "extraordinary fellow". However, no verified passage in Feynman's own books or in Gleick's biography is known in which Melville Feynman uses the phrase "a very special extraordinary fellow". Any claim that the quotation comes from the Feynman literature should be regarded as an interpretation of the relationship, not a documented quotation.

Why phrases become misattributed

The case of "extraordinary fellow" shows several common ways a generic phrase becomes linked to specific famous sources.

Conflation

Conflation means merging two or more separate memories into one. A reader who remembers Gandalf's "very fine person" and "little fellow", and also remembers the idea of being "special" from other books, may combine them into a single "quotation" that never existed in that form.

Translation

Works first written in other languages, such as Lindgren's Swedish books, exist in several English translations, and the translations often differ. A phrase may appear in one translation and not another. Retranslating a quotation into Swedish or German and back again can also produce wordings that the original author never used.

Character fit

When a phrase suits a famous character, people tend to assume that character said it. Toad and Karlsson are obvious "extraordinary fellows" in personality, so the phrase seems to belong to them even where it does not appear in the text. Researchers of quotations sometimes describe this as quotations "migrating" to well-known figures. The American quotation researcher Garson O'Toole, who runs the Quote Investigator website, has documented many such cases.

Confident unsourced answers

Answers given in conversation, on question-and-answer websites, and by automated text-generating systems sometimes name a source with great confidence but give no edition, page or chapter. A specific-sounding attribution is not the same as a verified one. The more precise the claimed wording, the easier it should be to find in the original text. If it cannot be found, the claim should be treated with caution.

Related phrases and traditions

"For He's a Jolly Good Fellow"

"For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" is one of the most widely sung celebratory songs in English. It is used at birthdays, retirements and other occasions. Its tune is generally traced to the French folk song "Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre" ("Marlborough Has Gone to War"), which dates from the 18th century. The song shows how firmly "good fellow" became an expression of warm social approval.

"A very fine person"

As noted above, Tolkien's "You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins" is often mixed up with "extraordinary fellow". It is a useful example of the affectionate, slightly formal praise found in mid-20th-century British children's literature.

"You are special" in children's literature and media

The word "special" in the fuller form of the phrase reflects a more recent tradition of affirmation, meaning statements intended to reassure a child of their worth. Examples include:

• Max Lucado's You Are Special (1997), a picture book about a small wooden person named Punchinello in a village of wooden people called Wemmicks. It carries a Christian message about personal worth.
• Fred Rogers, the American children's television presenter of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He regularly told viewers that there was no one else in the world exactly like them and that he liked them just as they were. This is television rather than literature, but it is one of the best-known sources of the "you are special" message in American culture.

The phrase "very special extraordinary fellow" combines this modern language of affirmation with the older, more ambiguous Victorian and Edwardian "extraordinary fellow". That mixture is one reason the fuller form is hard to trace to any single source.

Eccentricity as a literary type

The "extraordinary fellow" belongs to a recognisable character type in English fiction: the brilliant or lovable eccentric. Examples often discussed include Dickens's comic eccentrics, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes as seen through Dr. Watson's mixture of admiration and bafflement, and the amiable, hapless gentlemen of P. G. Wodehouse's comic novels. The phrase fits all of these as a description. This article makes no claim about exactly where, or whether, it appears in any particular text by these authors.

How to verify a quotation of this kind

Because "extraordinary fellow" is common and generic, claims about its source can usually be tested directly. Standard methods include:

1. Ask for an exact citation. A reliable attribution names the work, the edition or translation, and the chapter or page.
2. Search the original text. Many older works, including The Wind in the Willows, are in the public domain and searchable through collections such as Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust and Google Books.
3. Check the original language. For translated works, find the passage in the original language and compare several translations.
4. Check the earliest date. Search digitised books and newspapers for the earliest appearance of the exact wording. If it appears long before the work it is credited to, that work cannot be its origin.
5. Be wary of paraphrase. A passage that expresses a similar idea is not the same as a quotation. Biographies often summarise relationships in the biographer's own words, and these summaries can later be mistaken for things the subject actually said.

Open questions

• Earliest use. The earliest recorded English use of the exact combination "extraordinary fellow" has not been established here. Both words were well established by the 17th century, so the combination may be considerably older than the 19th-century fiction in which it is most familiar.
• Translations of Lindgren. Whether any published English, German or other translation of the Karlsson books uses wording close to "a very special, extraordinary fellow" has not been confirmed. A survey of translations would settle the question.
• The fuller wording. It is not known whether "you are a very special extraordinary fellow" has a single printed source, such as a children's book, a film script or a translation, or whether it is purely a modern paraphrase.

See also

• Misattributed quotations
• Collocation (linguistics)
• Etymology of "fellow"
• Karlsson-on-the-Roof
• The Hobbit
• The Wind in the Willows
• Richard Feynman
• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
• "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow"
• You Are Special (Max Lucado)
• Understatement in British English
• Quote Investigator