NYTimes, On the falseness of quotes...

BLOT: (31 Aug 2011 - 12:28:59 PM)

NYTimes, On the falseness of quotes...

You can skip my write up and go straight to the NYTimes article I am referencing, Brian Morton's Falser Words Were Never Spoken, and probably save yourself some time. Or, well, I can tell you the gist. We all love quotes. Love 'em. Adore 'em. Sometimes contemplate marrying them. I'm the same way. I now keep them out of my email signatures and try not to, you know, quote [ha, take that split infinitive haters, I did it for you!] them at folk too much, but I still get a smile on my face when I hear one that is both particularly pithy and yet germane, the golden twin stars of quotedom.

There are two rough problems with "quotes", in the sense of comma-Bartlett's-Famous: context and authority. The context is a big one. I recently added a Vonnegut quote to my Goodreads profile: "Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way." Awesome quote, right? Still true now as when it showed up in Breakfast of Champions. We kill ourselves to live. Said that way back when my dad's late night job seemed to be seriously interfering with his health. I'll avoid going off on that tangent but you have a pithy, germane quote...that just happens to eschew its context to become a quote. In the book, there are two guys talking—Kilgore Trout and a trucker—and they are kind on the same wavelength as my comment about my father, but that is beside the point. The quote exists because it is reamed out of context and plopped down into whatever relative context we need it to fit. Which sometimes works but often time fails just a little. Polonius claiming, "Brevity is the soul of wit," is Shakespeare being comic. That man was the longest winded character in the play. It was a joke, but it still gets cited all the time as a perfectly serious line. Much like later, after being duplicitous and sneaking around and stuff, he quips, "To thine own self be true," which (a) I guess his own self was a deceitful wind bag, and (b) all this means is parents have been pulling that "Do what I say, not what I do" crap for centuries.

Authority is the other big one. And is kind of the point of Morton's article. Not only are quotes de-contextualized, but they are often presented as complete packets. In order to achieve this: they get chunks elided, punctuation tweaked, and, in some cases, paraphrased. What's more, no one wants a nobody [note: "nobody" can simply mean, in this case, someone whom the person doing the quoting hasn't heard of...depending on the quoter, this can be a surprisingly large number of people] behind a quote so quotes regularly get attributed to people who could have said something like that. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill get who knows how many quotes put to their names that they never thought, much less wrote down or delivered in a speech. Even when they did say it, it is not uncommon for quotes to first cut out something, and then later cut out even the ellipses to make a point. Two of my favorite bits from Morton's article...

Perhaps you've noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote [Ghandi]: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like...a bumper sticker...it turns out there is no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation. The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him...We need not wait to see what others do."

And, one attributed to Nelson Mandela...

"Our deepest fear," the passage goes, "is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world."

Morton informs that the words are not Mandela's, they are from a self-help guru named Marianne Williamson.

Any favorite quotes that you know of that misattributed, false, paraphrased, or otherwise out of contexted to the point of inadvertent, and maybe tragic, fun?

Reading Culture

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2011