My postillion has been struck by lightning

"My postillion has been struck by lightning", "our postillion has been struck by lightning", and other variations on the same pattern, are often given as examples of the ridiculed phrases supposed to have been found in phrase books or language instruction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The word postillion may occur in its alternative spelling postilion.
Although various forms of the sentence are widely cited, the exact wording and the context in which it is said to have originally been used vary. For example, a teaching manual attributes it to a Portuguese–English phrasebook (possibly alluding to English as She Is Spoke):
By contrast a linguistics textbook mentions the supposedly "apocryphal" phrase during a description of foreign language teaching in "the schoolrooms of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century":
During the nineteenth century, publishers began producing multilingual phrase-books for businessmen and wealthy travellers. An early example is Georg Wolfrum's Handbuch für Jünglinge (1825), which gives English, German, French and Italian versions of "Are the postilions insolent?" The same question is found in Baedeker's Conversationsbuch für Reisende.
John Murray's Handbook of Travel-Talk (1847) includes a section entitled "Accidents on a Journey". It gives English, French, German and Italian translation suggestions for a variety of mishaps which might befall a traveller, such as one's postillion becoming injured, or finding oneself in stormy weather:
A theatre review in the September 14, 1889, issue of the London illustrated weekly The Graphic includes a phrase very similar to the one under discussion, attributing it to Murray's travel guide:
The August 30, 1916, issue of the British magazine Punch includes this item:
Another usage of the phrase occurs in a 1932 book entitled Little Missions, written by "Septimus Despencer":
According to its introduction, the travels reported in the book occurred during "[t]he three years following the armistice of 1918": thus Despencer's discovery of the phrase would be dated during the period 1919–1921. In the April 2008 issue of the Quote ... Unquote newsletter, Nigel Rees speculates that the phrase "passed into general circulation" from Despencer's book.
In James Thurber's 1937 New Yorker article "There's No Place Like Home", a phrasebook from "the era of Imperial Russia" contains the "magnificent" line: "Oh, dear, our postillion has been struck by lightning!". Thurber speculates that such a "fantastic piece of disaster" must have been rare, "even in the days of the Czars". Thurber heard of the quote from "a writer in a London magazine".
Olivia Manning's 1951 novel School for Love has a scene in which the landlady, Miss Bohun, is teaching English to Mr. Liftshitz using a Russian grammar from which she dictates the sentence "Coachman, the postillion has been struck by lightning."
In James Michener's 1954 novel Sayonara, the heroine Hana-Ogi tries to learn a little English from a phrasebook to communicate with her American lover and based on its recommendation starts with this phrase, much to his bewilderment.
"The Postilion Has Been Struck By Lightning" is the title of a two-stanza poem by Patricia Beer, published in 1967. The poem was later selected for inclusion in The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse. In it, the author laments the death in a thunderstorm of "the best postilion I ever had".
In 1977 actor Dirk Bogarde titled the first volume of his autobiography A Postillion Struck By Lightning. According to Bogarde, he heard of the sentence while on a childhood holiday in France. It came from an old French phrase-book belonging to the nanny of another family.
A jocular verse titled "Ballad of Domestic Calamity" attributed to M.H. Longson contains the phrase at the end of each stanza.
In a 1995 paper, linguist David Crystal defined "postilion sentences" as "sentences introduced in teaching [that] seem to have little or no chance of ever being used in real life". They are named after the phrase "The postilion has been struck by lightning", which Crystal describes as a famous example of such a sentence. He goes on to suggest that "an unexpectedly large number of sentences, used routinely with children with language impairment, are of this type", and gives as examples "That table's got four legs", and "Clap (your) hands!". He concludes that, "if teaching and therapeutic time is to be truly efficacious", postilion sentences should be avoided.