Chipping Away at an Apocryphal Artist's Quote

That last post made me think of the story about a sculptor who revealed that his secret was simply to chip away everything that didn't look like a rabbit.  Or at least that's the way I remember it.

In a google search for "chip away everything that," I found several variants - and the most popular ones seem to feature either David (as in Michelangelo) or an elephant.   The earliest instance of that phrase that I could find on google scholar dates to a book published in 1979.  Here is the excerpt:

That has a nice flavor, doesn't it? It's from Like a Thousand Suns: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, by Eknath Easwaran (1979).

But on google books, I found an even earlier (albeit less exotic) instance of the phrase from 1964:

And it seems to have been a reader-submitted joke in the December 1963 issue of Boys Life:

Of course, then I got curious about whether the word in the quote should be "everything" or "anything".  It turns out that "chip away anything that" gets about 95,200 hits on google, vs. a measly 4,560 hits for "chip away everything that."

With the seemingly more popular formulation, I found an instance as early as 1975:

Again, this is relatively prosaic - it's from A guidebook for evaluating programs for the gifted and talented: working draft, by Joseph S. Renzulli (Office of the Ventura County Superintendent of Schools, 1975).

Things get more mysterious, however, when you add another word:

"chip away anything that"                        95,200 hits (total)

• "chip away anything that" elephant        61,600 hits  => most popular formulation is with the elephant!
• "chip away anything that" david             18,300 hits
• "chip away anything that" horse             10,900 hits

"chip away everything that"                        4,560 hits (total)

• "chip away everything that" elephant        180,000 hits  => most popular formulation is with the elephant!
• "chip away everything that" david             93,100 hits
• "chip away everything that" horse             79,600 hits

So it turns out that the everything formulation may be more popular, after all, when you add up the subcategories?  But the order of popularity of the subject of the sculpture remains (1) elephant - presumably the original, (2) David - presumably because everyone loves Michelangelo!, and (3) horse.  I don't have an explanative theory for the horse.

Alas, no one seems to like my rabbit formula.

Postscript: After mucking around with the tense of the verb "to chip," I've found an instance as early as 1960 on google books...




P.S. A few final rounds of searching with alternative tenses ("chipped" "chips" and "chipping") dredged up the oldest instance of the phrase I've been able to find yet on google books - published in 1960 by some dental hygienists!