WE’LL JUST HAVE TO PASS THIS NEW BILL TO FIND OUT HOW IT WORKS. A 1947 “Grin and Bear It” cartoon that seems eerily like Nancy Pelosi’s “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

The cartoon was described and misquoted a bit in today’s Obamacare case, but The Chief Justice can blame Felix Frankfurter for the misquote, and Felix can blame the Columbia Law Review editors. Didn’t they check the quotes meticulously back in 1947? Anyway, big thanks to Ben Zimmer at Language Log for putting that up today and to Tobias A. Dorsey at The Periwig Squiggle for digging that all up 5 years ago, when Pelosi uttered her most famous quote.

ADDED: “Grin and Bear It” — it brings on a flood of memories of reading the funny pages when I was a kid. I read everything on the page — “Nancy,” “Blondie,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Li’l Abner,” all of it, including “Grin and Bear It.” I didn’t want “Grin and Bear It” to be there, because it had no panels. It was just one picture, like a political cartoon, so why was it there in the company of Nancy and the rest, demanding that a little kid read it to complete the page? Complicated drawings of adults standing around, someone with a mouth open, indicating talking, but emitting no word bubble. There was just a caption, a caption full of words that meant something, but nothing that was funny from the perspective of kid eyes.