A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World Meaning
That Wasn't Marking Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born
How fitting that the homo often credited with saying "a prevarication can travel halfway effectually the world while the truth is however putting on its shoes" most likely did not invent the phrase.
Commonly attributed to Marking Twain, that quotation instead appears to be a descendant of a line published centuries agone past the satirist Jonathan Swift. Variants emerged and mutated over fourth dimension until a modern version of the proverb was popularized by a Victorian-era preacher, according to Garson O'Toole, a researcher who, similar Twain, prefers a pseudonym.
Seven years agone, Mr. O'Toole started Quote Investigator, a pop website where he traces the origins of well-known sayings. This month, he published "Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations," a book in which he collected and updated many of the posts from his site and offers new theories on how misquotations form.
"When I started off, information technology was mysterious exactly where these misquotations were coming from, and information technology was interesting that sometimes you lot could find these clues that pointed to how they may have originated," said Mr. O'Toole, an allonym for Gregory F. Sullivan, a former teacher and researcher in the Johns Hopkins informatics section who at present spends his time writing.
In the volume, Mr. Sullivan offers x common "mechanisms" that he says lead to misquotation and incorrect attribution.
Through one such process, which he labels "textual proximity," a famous person mistakenly gets credit for a quotation simply by having their proper name or likeness published close to the words. In some other, "ventriloquy," a statement about an individual'south piece of work is perceived to be so apt that information technology is eventually confused for their own words.
Both may explicate how Anton Chekhov, the Russian author, became associated with the saying: "Any idiot can face a crisis, it's the day-to-twenty-four hours living that wears you out," as outlined on Mr. Sullivan'southward website and, at present, in his book.
In May 2013, Mr. Sullivan heard from a reader who, after a fruitless try to prove Chekhov's authorship of those words, wanted help uncovering the true history of the quotation.
Mr. Sullivan accepted the challenge.
Google Books led him to "The Tradition of the Theatre," a textbook published in 1971 and edited past Peter Bauland and William Ingram. Just snippets were bachelor online, and so he visited a university library to review the book in full. In it, he constitute the following, written past Mr. Bauland and Mr. Ingram:
A graphic symbol in a Hollywood film of the 1950s casually drops this line: "Any idiot can confront a crisis; it'south this day-to-day living that wears you out." The screenplay was by Clifford Odets, America's main inheritor of the dramatic tradition of Anton Chekhov, and in that ane line, he epitomized the lesson of his principal.
Though Mr. Sullivan was unable to ostend Mr. Odets's authorship of the judgement, he theorized that Mr. Odets wrote something like, which was then misquoted in the 1971 textbook. The primeval citation Mr. Sullivan could find crediting the saying to Chekhov was from 1981.
That last attribution could have been the result of: textual proximity, in which an oblivious reader saw Chekhov's name and blindly attributed the quotation to him; ventriloquy, in which a reader found the line so resonated with Chekhov's style that these words were mistaken for his; or some combination.
Mr. Sullivan published his analysis in June 2013, simply more than two years later, a reader came forward with a new atomic number 82, referring him to the 1954 movie "The Land Daughter," based on a play by Mr. Odets.
Mr. Sullivan watched the moving picture and discovered these words uttered by Bing Crosby:
I faced a crisis up there in Boston, and I got away with it. Just about anybody can confront a crunch. It's that everyday living that's rough.
The movie was based on a play by Mr. Odets, but, after failing to find the line in a 1951 edition of the script, Mr. Sullivan believes that yet another homo most likely coined the phrase. Ultimately, he would credit the "any idiot" line to George Seaton, who wrote the screenplay.
The other mechanisms Mr. Sullivan identified include:
• Synthesis and streamlining, a process in which a quotation is simplified over time;
• Proverbial wisdom, in which a quotation is elevated to the condition of a maxim because its source is unknown;
• Real-world proximity, when an individual wrongly gets credit for a quotation because they share a real-globe connection to the truthful writer;
• Similar names, the mistaken attribution of a quotation to someone whose name resembles that of the true author;
• Concoctions, which are pure fabrications, intentional or otherwise;
• Historical fiction, when an private gets credit for words uttered by a graphic symbol portraying them in a movie, novel or other work of fiction;
• Capture, when a famous person gets credit for echoing the words of someone less well-known;
• Host, in which an individual, just by being famous, attracts credit for quotations they never delivered, with Mr. Twain and Albert Einstein beingness popular examples.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html
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