While Holmes did indeed speak the line "Elementary" in one of Doyle's original stories, the first recorded instance of the entire phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" comes from a film, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, where the classic line is uttered by Clive Brook. There is literature indicating that it may have been said earlier on the stage by the actor William Gillette as Holmes, but the phrase itself does not appear anywhere in the script in question (but seeing how he also wrote the script for the play, it could easily be taken as an author's liberties with his own script.) As far as we know, the line could have been in the common vernacular by then, so there's really no way of telling for sure who said it first.
And I don't think Noah counts.
The line also serves to raise some eyebrows between Holmes and Watson, and Sherlock for one receives this quite heavily. You know what I mean. The whole "my dear Watson" part. So maybe it was for the best that they Starbuck'd Watson in Elementary (yeah, it's a verb now. Look it up.) She's female here. So aside from incompatibilities in character (which may be being being chipped away as Watson herself becomes more and more capable a detective in herself) that kind of thing's not out of the question.
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