A longtime friend of mine stumbled onto one of those social media memes last week. “Count your age by friends, not years,” it went. “Count your life by smiles, not tears.” * It was credited to—wait for it—John Lennon.
Riiiight.
“I’d be willing to bet everything I own,” I commented on her Facebook page, “that John Lennon did not say that.” (And what I mean is, not only did he not originate that little adage, I doubt those words ever passed his lips.) “Who said it then?” my friend asked. My guess: “Someone at the Hallmark Card Company?”
You surely know by now this is a pet peeve of mine (and I’m fortunate my friends are so gracious when I air them). I dislike false attribution or misquotes. It’s sloppy. And this little exchange reminded me of a piece I found in the New York Times. In it, writer Brian Morton takes on misquotes of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela.
“Our deepest fear,” the passage [said to be an excerpt from his 1994 inaugural address] 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. … As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Picture it: Mr. Mandela, newly free after 27 years in prison, using his inaugural platform to inform us that we all have the right to be gorgeous, talented and fabulous, and that thinking so will liberate others. It’s hard to imagine it without laughing. Of course, it turns out it’s not actually an excerpt from this or any other known address of Mr. Mandela’s. In fact, the words aren’t even his; they belong to a self-help guru, Marianne Williamson.
We’ve talked about this before. And we were just talking about it earlier this week. Morton goes on to say, “When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso—all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.”
I’ve got no problem with smiling through my aged tears, but I’m still certain the John Lennon connection is in error (but thanks to Carol for giving me such a great hook for this post!). If you want to quote Lennon, try this instead:
Nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.
It’s easy. All you need is love. **
* I recognized it immediately: another friend of mine cross-stitched those words into a sampler for me on my thirtieth birthday. It’s matted and framed and hangs in the stairwell; I look at it every day on my way to my office.
** “All You Need Is Love,” written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon-McCartney, was © Northern Songs Ltd. in 1967.
UPDATE: As it turns out, I was right: John Lennon really didn’t say this. Read about it here.
Tweet: This is a pet peeve: I dislike false attribution or misquotes. It’s sloppy.
Tweet: I’d be willing to bet everything I own that John Lennon did not say that.
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