Your Editor spends a lot of time checking facts. Particularly the sorts of facts that can be stated in the form of a question: Really? Are you sure? Did Abraham Lincoln really say that? Because yes, I spend a lot of time researching (ahem) famous quotes. More than I’d like.
For example, an author whose manuscript I am working on suggests a quote from George Washington for chapter 3:
The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by our nation.
But the words our young people just leap off the page at me. Parsed separately or together, the idiom is simply too modern. I’m pretty sure folks didn’t talk like that in the eighteenth century. (Of course, as I’ve noted before, we don’t actually know how people talked two and a half centuries ago.)
I believe, too, that Washington wasn’t really thinking about veterans of earlier wars … because his United States hadn’t really fought but the one.* He was a forward-thinker, our George, he was, but not yet about our young people and our nation appreciating veterans.
All this goes through my mind before I even research it, and when I do, it’s easy: the folks at Mount Vernon have disavowed it, including it on their SPURIOUS QUOTES page. Now, I like this word spurious. The first meaning listed in my fave dictionary is “of illegitimate birth: bastard” (which is pretty much what I think of this quote). Spurious is a word that cuts no corners, pulls no punches, holds nothing back.
Not all quotes are spurious, of course. Some are just incorrectly credited. In the same week, different manuscript, an author attributes this gem to Mark Twain: “If I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter.” It doesn’t set off any internal alarms, but I’m suspicious of any quoted material, so I check it. And—you guessed it—Twain didn’t say/write it—it was the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. (My friend at Quote Investigator even has an article on it—“Mark Twain … did not use it according to the best available research”—and this guy spends a lot more time on these things than I do.)
I correct the manuscript, provide some links—including my earlier article on the spuriousness of BrainyQuote, ThinkExist, et al—and the author responds, “I’d always heard it was Mark Twain.” Well, yes, friend, I understand. But if there is anything at all I’ve learned in this business, it’s that what I’ve always heard or what I am certain I was taught or how I remember it … is very often wrong. So I check.
And that’s the thing—we have pretty good research materials available to us. We may not know how people spoke three or four hundred years ago, but they did leave us plenty of written clues, which—with rare exceptions—is where all these quotables come from anyway: their diaries, letters, books, speeches.** Men as famous as George Washington are well catalogued, and the catalogues are very often online. Wikiquote does a good job, too, of listing original source material. Check everywhere.
Related posts:
No, You May Not Use Brainyquote as Your Source
The Internet Can Be Unreliable
Someone Is Wrong on the Internet!
Falser Words Were Never Spoken
Watch Those Quotes!
* Oh, sure, there were those French and Indian wars, but they were actually European wars fought in North America. Different.
** Good luck with the Gettysburg Address, though.
Tweet: Let us now quote famous men.
Tweet: Really? Are you sure? Did Abraham Lincoln really say that?
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