Not the proof

MountGrace and I are linguistic pedants from way back. In our house TV watching is punctuated by muttered corrections of wrong words, mistakes in grammar, mispronunciations…

A pet hate of mine at the moment is ‘The proof is in the pudding’. Wrong (well I think so). The expression should be ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’.

Wiktionary says ‘The current phrasing is generally attributed to the 1701 translation by Peter Anthony Motteux of a proverb Miguel de Cervantes used in Don Quixote (1615), al freír de los huevos lo verá (“you will see it when you fry the eggs”). Goes to show you can’t trust the accuracy of translations.