A variant is found as early as 1538, when James Dyer reported that a judge in the Court of Common Pleas pithily "compared the case to a Banbury cheese, which is worth little when the parings are cut off. And here the case is brief in substance, if the superfluous trifling that is pleaded be taken away". A similar insult is made in Jack Dunn's "Entertainment" (1601): "Put off your clothes and you are like a Banbury cheese—nothing but paring". According to linguist Frederic S. Marquardt, writing in 1928, "you Banbury cheese" was still in the common parlance of American slang; a simplified American descendant of the insult was "you big cheese."