eleventh commandmentn.

1857 C. Kingsley Two Years Ago III. i. 37 ‘No one has a right to be idle.’ ‘Oh!’ groaned Claude; ‘where did you find that eleventh commandment?’

1886 E. Lynn Linton Paston Carew I. iii. 46 He had learned the eleventh commandment [sc. do not tell tales out of school] to the echo and was the safest confidant to be found within the four seas.

1970 R. Millar Abelard & Eloise i. iii. 9 Thou canst not serve God and woman. Gilles..You hear that, Peter? Fulbert has unearthed the Eleventh Commandment.

1979 Fowles & Horvat Tree 22 It was almost as if he had let one of his cordons grow as it liked, a blasphemous breaking of his own eleventh commandment: Thou shalt prune all trees.

1987 Church Times 28 Aug. 5/1 Rabbi Julia Neuberger..said that..perhaps the eleventh commandment should be ‘to treasure the environment we have for future generations’.

1860 G. J. Whyte Melville Holmby House I. xv. 213 Members..who wink conveniently at the infraction of every commandment in the Decalogue, provided you are scrupulous to keep the eleventh,..and which says, ‘thou shalt not be found out!’

1876 B. H. Buxton Jennie of ‘the Prince's’ III. xiii. 314 I could never have survived being ‘found out’, so I had to pay heavily. After all, that eleventh commandment is the only one that it is vitally important to keep in these days.

1912 Intimacies of Court & Society ii. 30 The pariahs of England, that land sacred to the eleventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not be found out’.

1970 N. Fleming Czech Point (1971) viii. 98 I reminded myself of another of his maxims—the one that he called the 11^th commandment: ‘Don't get caught’.

1984 in Amer. Speech (1985) 60 247 Do English gentlemen have mistresses, or do they religiously observe the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not be found out?

1966 Los Angeles Times 3 June 3/6 The candidate [sc. Ronald Reagan]..declared in response to a question at a Pacific Telephone public affairs forum that he would not break the so-called 11^th commandment which prohibits Republicans from speaking ill of each other.

1975 in Amer. Speech (1985) 60 246 [Ronald Reagan] believes in the so-called eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans.

1976 New Yorker 15 Mar. 111/3 Mrs. Perry Duryea, in dramatic violation of the Eleventh Commandment according to Ronald Reagan—that a Republican should not speak ill of another Republican—announced..that..Rockefeller was not fit for the Vice-Presidency or any other office.

1985 Amer. Speech 60 244 In its most common formulation the Eleventh Commandment enjoins Republicans not to bad-mouth other Republicans.