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For more than a half-century, people have been sharing a story about a conversation between two people — one of whom forgets the other's name and asks a series of questions seemingly in an attempt to recall the lost memory. Among the questions is a version of, How is your brother/sister? After that, the other person delivers the anecdote's punchline: that relative is a member of the British royal family or the U.S. President. Here's one version, which Snopes came across in a 1949 edition of Reader's Digest: More than two decades later, in 1972, another issue of Reader's Digest printed: We linked another iteration to Fadiman in 1985: The still the President version has been trotted out about Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and William Taft. The Coolidge version is easy to disprove; Coolidge’s only sister died in 1890, many years before he became president in 1923. Corinne Roosevelt (Mrs. Douglas Robinson) outlived her celebrated brother. Still the queen and its variants are told about members of the British royal family, or will in some other way involve Britain. When the royal in question is Queen Elizabeth II, either her sister Margaret or her husband Philip get to deliver the killing line. British composer Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) is reputed to have told this story on himself as an incident that happened when he ran into the sister of the King of England. A more modern version skewers Sir Laurence Olivier in an encounter with the sister of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, and the most recent of all features British Prime Minister Tony Blair having a still the queen episode with the ruler of the Netherlands. Trying to trace an anecdote back to the incident it supposedly grew out of is a frustrating practice at the best of times and an impossible one when the same tale is told about numerous people, each of whom is now long dead. As an anecdote, we know this story has been in circulation in still the President form since 1946 when it appeared in a collection of jokes, and in still the king form from 1943 when it surfaced in a biography of Beecham. In the case of personal glimpse tales circulated long after supposed events, there’s little way to tell if the incident(s) reported took place or if the stories were coined at a later date. We know both versions were passed around as illustrative tales in the 1940s; we don’t know if either actually happened in real life. It’s possible all of these tales stem from one true-life incident that has since come to be remembered about various U.S. presidents and British royals. It’s equally possible it was always a fable. Yet fable or not, the story kept popping up. Here's a September 1999 version, straight from the lips of then-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair: Who hasn’t experienced that sinking feeling upon greeting a familiar face and engaging the person in conversation only to realize the name isn’t being dredged up out of memory to be matched up with the person who stands before you? Forgetting someone’s name is a faux pas; admitting to such a lapse implies one didn’t think the person important enough to remember, a slip teetering on the edge of insult. It’s a socially awkward situation, and weathering it comes down to a choice between attempting to gracefully tread conversational water while waiting for enlightenment, or confessing all and risking being thought a boor. In the realm of legend, those who don’t come clean about the lapse are riding for a fall. Urban legends, after all, are often cautionary tales, warning us against various behaviors by illustrating what has happened to others who failed to do the right thing. Even as we laugh at the still the queen line, we picture ourselves smarting on the receiving end of it. Etiquette maven Judith Martin has this bit of advice for those looking to avoid becoming the object of such a comeback:
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