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Just saw an episode title (Legacies, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14178112/?ref_=tt_eps_cu_n) called "Yup, It's a Leprechaun, All Right".

This reminded me of an old game I used to play, where you click on a cow and it says "Yep, it's a cow, all right".

This kind of sentence seems to be used prety often, so I was wondering if it is maybe a reference to some famous quote I don't know that native speakers maybe all know?

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    I think it was Adam to Eve: "Yep, it's a snake, all right!"
    – Hot Licks
    Mar 20, 2021 at 0:47
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    @HotLicks haha, citation required ;p Mar 20, 2021 at 1:32
  • I'm not sure that the second comma should be there. In my experience (Br English, Am English usage may differ) the "all right" follows the statement immediately when spoken and, more importantly, functions as a support to or intensification of the statement. I also think of it as the modern equivalent of the Renaissance "verily" where people would say things like "Verily, 'tis a serpent!" Admittedly this has the comma indicating a conceptual break but perhaps this is part of the reason that the "verily" form disappeared
    – BoldBen
    Mar 20, 2021 at 5:33

2 Answers 2

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so I was wondering if it is maybe a reference to some famous quote

It is a perfectly ordinary collocation. Your question is rather like asking for the origin of "It's a cow, isn't it?' originated.

OED:

A. all right: adv.

1. Used as an intensifier at the end of a sentence or clause: certainly, indeed.

a1413 (▸c1385) G. Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde (Pierpont Morgan) (1881) i. l. 99 Criseyde was þis lady name al right.

And I am sure that Chaucer was not the first to use it.

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  • Well, when you're tracing a phrase back to Chaucer, I suppose a follow-up question would be if it came from the Germanic Anglo-Saxon side of English, or the Norman French side of it.
    – nick012000
    Dec 22, 2021 at 5:27
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Google-fu:

  • The cow sentence is using "that's" instead of "it's".
  • We can set a wildcard for the object.
  • We can add a filter "before:1994".

"Yep, that's a * all right" before:1994

We get only one result:

"Yep. That’s a beach all right.”

Guess you can improve from here.

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