"My postillion has been struck by lightning", "our postillion has been struck by lightning", and other variations on the same pattern, are often given as examples of the ridiculous phrases supposed to have been found in phrase books or language instruction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word postillion may occur in its alternative spelling postilion.
Although various forms of the sentence are widely cited, the exact wording and the context in which it is said to have originally been used vary. For example, a teaching manual attributes it to a Portuguese-English phrasebook (possibly alluding to English as She Is Spoke):
The phrase-book for Portuguese learners of English which included the often-quoted and bizarre sentence 'Pardon me, but your postillion has been struck by lightning' demonstrates a total lack of sense of context: who can have said this, to whom and in what circumstances?[1]
By contrast a linguistics textbook mentions the supposedly "apocryphal" phrase during a description of foreign language teaching in "the schoolrooms of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century":
[S]entences—especially constructed to contain only the grammar and vocabulary which had already been covered—were laboriously translated, in writing, into and out of the student's first language. Such sentences, often bizarrely remote from any conceivable use, have been the occasion for jokes ever since. We have probably all heard references to the apocryphal "My postilion has been struck by lightning" and the infamous plume de ma tante.[2]
- ^ Broughton, Geoffrey; Christopher Brumfit; Roger Flavell; Roger D. Wilde; Anita Pincas (1988). Teaching English as a Foreign Language (2nd ed.). London; New York: Routledge. p. 41. ISBN 0-415-05882-1.; emphasis added
- ^ Cook, Guy (2003). Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 31–32. ISBN 0-19-437598-6.; emphasis added