Who said that?
One of the annoying things journalists struggle with is verbatim statements from sources, as indicated in quotes.
Reporters are strictly restricted. Get it first. Get everything. Do it well.
Editorialists have a little room for manoeuvre. Get underway. Get to the point. Reach a conclusion.
Feature writers, my role in this space, are expected to do background citations. Are they true, original and relevant?
Over the years, I have amassed a plethora of lost, stolen, or misplaced citations. In this doc, some housecleaning, with the help of my trusty “Bartlett Family Quotes.”
Who doesn’t get emotional today with that line from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address?
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
That line has a long history of serving politicians. He was first voiced by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in 1884 as an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court. Shortly thereafter he was appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
As a Union veteran of the Civil War, he was asked to address the John Sedgwick Post, Grand Army of the Republic. He said:
Stripped of the temporary associations that gave rise to it, it is now the time when by common consent we stop to become aware of and rejoice in our national life, to remember what our country has done for each one of us and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
This lofty sentiment was echoed in 1904 by LeBaron Russell Briggs writing in “College Life.” He said: “As has often been said, the young man who loves his Alma Mater will always ask, not ‘What can she do for me?’ but ‘What can I do for her?'”
Warren G. Harding cemented the thought in the political lexicon in his speech to the Republican National Convention, Chicago, in 1916: “In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenry less concerned about what the government can do for them, and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.”
Harding’s speech electrified the convention and launched him into the public spotlight that resulted in his election as president in 1920.
lincoln and stevenson
Abraham Lincoln had the ability to express important thoughts in a homey way. Asked by a reporter for Leslie’s Weekly how he felt about the 1862 election, in which the Republicans lost many seats in Congress because the Civil War was going badly, Lincoln replied:
“I feel a bit like the kid in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his girlfriend. The kid said he was too old to cry and too hurt to laugh.”
Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic candidate for President in 1952 against the eventual winner Dwight Eisenhower. When Stevenson was asked how he felt about losing, he recalled Lincoln:
“I feel like a little kid who stubbed his toe in the dark who was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”
famous misquotes
Another challenge to the proper use of quotation marks is comments so apt to enter the public domain and be modified over the years. In the trade, journalists call them “misquotes.” Wrong wording, but permissible by common usage. The quotes are optional.
Misquotes are usually shortened versions that get to the point faster and stick in the mind longer.
To express desperate love, we like to repeat an order from Humphrey Bogart in the movie Casablanca.
While depressed about an ex-girlfriend, he asks his nightclub pianist, Sam, to play and sing a sad song to remind him of him. Sam concludes, but Bogart is remembered pleading: “Play it again, Sam.”
The actual line, when Sam protested having to repeat a depressing love song, was simply brief: “Play it!”
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we all know that “Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned.” That bit of wisdom is distilled from a play “The Mourning Bride” by William Congreave in 1697.
The actual line, however, is: “Heaven has no fury like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like that of a woman scorned.”
* * *
William Shakespeare, the immortal bard, is still being refined by aspiring modern playwrights. We say: Alas, poor Yorick! She knew him well.
In the play Hamlet, the main character laments to a companion about a human skull recovered from a shallow grave: “Oh, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.
* * *
Even the Christian Bible is rearranged from time to time for common usage. We often say: “Money is the root of evil.”
The King James Version, Timothy I, records it more carefully as: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
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The most famous misquote is attributed to Baseball Hall of Fame player and manager Leo Durocher, if we can take his word for it.
When he became coach of the Chicago Cubs in last place in 1966, he is alleged to have told his players: “Nice guys finish last!”
Whatever he said, over the next six years the Cubs finished second four times, third once and fourth once.
In later years he vigorously denied the popular quote. “I never said that. I said if I was playing third base and my mom rounded third base with the winning run, I’d trip her up.”
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Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II, was a superb and creative speaker. However, he was often misquoted and did not hesitate to embellish well-known phrases of others.
In the disturbances in South Africa that led to the Boer War of 1899-1902, Churchill was a newspaper correspondent. In one of his dispatches he allegedly said: “Nothing in life is as exciting as being shot and missing.”
Today’s pragmatists miss the ironic understatement of his actual words: “fired without result”.
its famous “blood, sweat and tears” the speech generously built on earlier similar sentiments and is generally misquoted today.
At the nadir of the conflict with Nazi Germany, Churchill warned beleaguered Britain in May 1940: “I have nothing to offer but blood, canvas, tears and sweat.”
Most people today leave out the word “hard work” when quoting Churchill. Perhaps we feel that “hard work” is not in the same category as vital body substances. Or, four vital elements can subvert the usual three element statements we usually expect to back up a good joke or story.
It is certainly different from that of the poet John Donne who wrote in 1611: “Appease him with your tears, sweat or blood.”
And that of the poet John Byron in 1823: “Year after year they voted one hundred percent. Millions squeezed with blood, sweat and tears. Why? For rent.”
And Churchill’s phrase in his 1931 book “The Unknown War” – referring to the Czar’s armies before the Russian Revolution – wrote: “His sweat, his tears, his blood drenched the endless plain.”
However, the prime minister liked his enlarged version so much that he used it five more times in his speeches.
No matter. The public edited the phrase to its simplest form, demonstrating the inherent power of the public imagination.
October 19, 2003