Thank you, Linda! I was wondering the other day where phonus balonus came from, and though it doesn't seem to have a single originator, it nonetheless has a long and distinguished history going back to Damon Runyon, Clifford Odets, and other jaunty folk.
I am sure it will not surprise you in the least to know that the same problem pops up all the time with regard to J. R. R. Tolkien's work. A friend of mine has done invaluable work debunking the Fake Tolkien Quotes (I'm going to send him a link to your post after I comment!), and I talk about his work, as well as my own discovery of a sort of fake quote, here: https://robinareid.substack.com/p/misquoting-tolkien
I am seeing more and more people attributing quotes from Peter Jackson's movies to "Tolkien" just by name never any citation. And since Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens did draw on some of Tolkien's dialogue and narration (often giving it to another character, or shifting it in time/location, to brilliant results in many cases), I'm not sure these are as fake so much as misattributed, but still major error as far as I'm concerned. Why not just attribute it to Jackson??????
It's as if properly attributing a quote to a brilliantly adapting screenwriter or screenwriters diminishes the quote. As much as I love E. M. Forster, it delights me that this particular exchange, one of the best things in the film of A Room with a View, is not his but Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's:
Charlotte Bartlett: I shall never forgive myself.
Lucy Honeychurch: You always say that, Charlotte, but you always do forgive yourself.
I know! (We loved that film so. very. much!--a good adaptation adds to much to the source text).
I supposed it's pure laziness (in the sense of looking at the first item on the Google search list and shoving it in. In the case of the one I looked at, I'm seeing more and more how alt-right extremists want to claim "Tolkien" (and their version of his imagined Middle Ages) as their authority.
This was timely for me and so fun to read. I am working on a project where I am quoting Tony Kushner (from an interview I read) but he was quoting Brecht. As I read your piece I wondered what if Tony was just going on and it wasn't a Brecht quote? I followed your instructions and voila! Many entries on the quote attributed to Brecht... "Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones". Thank you!
I once wrote a story for the United Methodist Reporter about quotes misattributed to Methodism founder John Wesley, such as "I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.” (Setting oneself ablaze is such an entirely un-Methodist thing to do, I don't know why that one persists.)
Oddly, in writing and publishing the story, some people were a little offended when they learned that there's no record that Wesley ever said, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” It's repeated so often that some felt he should have said it, I guess. Anyway, thank you for this, it is gold! I'm printing it out because this issue comes up often for me. In fact, I need to check a quote attributed to Verdi for a story I'm writing today.
As soon as I started reading this, I wondered if you'd also run across the App That Will Not Be Named, which the Authors Guild is also looking into. Horrible, especially because the robots that were illegally fed our books to train them on language are now being used to misrepresent those very books.
Also, one of the proudest moments in my writing career was when I was able to demonstrate that Benjamin Franklin never wrote that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy...and also that he didn't actually invent a recipe for spruce beer, he merely copied it out of a cookbook into his notebook, as one does. Cheers to the librarians and archivists who helped me trace those all the way back to primary sources.
I can't imagine how that App That Will Not Be Named can make a go of it. I mean, who's that stupid? (I know, I know, don't answer that question.) But I put great faith in the industriousness and diligence of my former colleagues at PRH—the legal and anti-piracy ones, particularly—who I know take this sort of thing seriously.
I have a 2010 book called "In the Words of Nelson Mandela" (Walker & Co) that includes a famous misattribution. You know the one: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure...," which belongs, alas, to Marianne Williamson. According to QI, the NYT wrote about the widespread misattribution in 1998 and the Nelson Mandela Foundation wrote about it in 2007, yet here it is in 2010 in an edited quote book. Who knows? Maybe they thought no one would want "In the Words of Nelson Mandela" if it didn't include his most famous quote. It means more when Mandela tells you you're powerful beyond measure or Wilde tells you to be yourself—or at least you're likelier to buy the T-shirt.
Re Sherwin-Williams: One of my junior-high classmates was the scion of a rival paint company. One day he solemnly informed me that the "Cover the Earth" slogan and image were the tipoff that Sherwin-Williams was a Communist front. Everyone knew it, this little pisher said.
Hey, this was SO good. It was the opposite of waning and moribund, and an exemplar of how to write as yourself. For these reasons alone, I was punching the air, never mind the content, B Lillie, and a photo of Audrey Hepburn.
The richness to a reader of an author who is himself cannot be overestimated. Did I just write that: it reads like shite. But I’ll leave it in and try and explain.
Of course, I dig all the copywriting shtick, and all the ephemera you use to bring it to wonderful life; but what I find really does it for me as a reader is the sense that you are being you when you write. It’s kind of priceless, and makes reading you feel rewarding and pleasurable and multilayered (which is particularly interesting because of the glittering surface of language and content)
I’m now worried I’ve written myself into a gushing corner. Or that I look creepy. So I’ll click post before I just overgush. But if I have overgushed, at least I’ve followed your inspiration and been myself. And I’m really not creepy. Just a fan. In a good way.
I just had to refer to this while doing an edit and trying to find exactly where E Barreett Browning said something noble about hospitals. (In Aurora Leigh apparently.) Which I would not have found without recourse to Google Books so THANK YOU.
In a short story I'd drafted before reading this article, I'd made reference to Twain's "The rumors of my death . . . " I had checked that he said it, and found he said something in that vein but using different words. Every time I've read the line in the story, I've cringed, but Twain's language just didn't flow.
I don't know if I'll keep it, but I came up what I think is clever (and I know humor is hard to get right), adding the last phrase to the paragraph, possibly with a footnote to this post.
[The character, having just read in his bio, written by ChatGPT, that he died some years earlier.] He posted the obit on Facebook, adding Twain’s famous “The report of my death is exaggerated.” Moments later, his phone began to ping with condolences, memorials festooned with laughing and crying emojis, and *a note from his friend Benjamin that the quote captured Twain’s sentiment but wasn’t precisely what the man said.*
FYI, the story was accepted by HamLit and published today. (My first fiction in a juried anthology.) I kept the note directing readers to your essay. Should you be so inclined and curious: https://hamlit.org/the-order-of-lazarus/.
Phonus balonus 😂😂 That should come in handy when discussing a certain politician’s outlandish claims. I do love the way you write.
Thank you, Linda! I was wondering the other day where phonus balonus came from, and though it doesn't seem to have a single originator, it nonetheless has a long and distinguished history going back to Damon Runyon, Clifford Odets, and other jaunty folk.
I swore you made it up.
I agree, because he’s clever like that! Still love it even if it isn’t an original Dreyerism.
I will confess to not even having made up my beloved (and probably overused) vicey versey. I stole it from a friend of my husband's.
Sounds like Benjamin Franklin’s (alleged) description of insanity.
I am sure it will not surprise you in the least to know that the same problem pops up all the time with regard to J. R. R. Tolkien's work. A friend of mine has done invaluable work debunking the Fake Tolkien Quotes (I'm going to send him a link to your post after I comment!), and I talk about his work, as well as my own discovery of a sort of fake quote, here: https://robinareid.substack.com/p/misquoting-tolkien
I am seeing more and more people attributing quotes from Peter Jackson's movies to "Tolkien" just by name never any citation. And since Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens did draw on some of Tolkien's dialogue and narration (often giving it to another character, or shifting it in time/location, to brilliant results in many cases), I'm not sure these are as fake so much as misattributed, but still major error as far as I'm concerned. Why not just attribute it to Jackson??????
It's as if properly attributing a quote to a brilliantly adapting screenwriter or screenwriters diminishes the quote. As much as I love E. M. Forster, it delights me that this particular exchange, one of the best things in the film of A Room with a View, is not his but Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's:
Charlotte Bartlett: I shall never forgive myself.
Lucy Honeychurch: You always say that, Charlotte, but you always do forgive yourself.
I know! (We loved that film so. very. much!--a good adaptation adds to much to the source text).
I supposed it's pure laziness (in the sense of looking at the first item on the Google search list and shoving it in. In the case of the one I looked at, I'm seeing more and more how alt-right extremists want to claim "Tolkien" (and their version of his imagined Middle Ages) as their authority.
This was timely for me and so fun to read. I am working on a project where I am quoting Tony Kushner (from an interview I read) but he was quoting Brecht. As I read your piece I wondered what if Tony was just going on and it wasn't a Brecht quote? I followed your instructions and voila! Many entries on the quote attributed to Brecht... "Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones". Thank you!
Of course if it's Kushner quoting Brecht you're covered by the safety of the fact that it's Kushner doing the quoting, not you.
Delightful. Thank you.
Thank *you,* Bill.
I once wrote a story for the United Methodist Reporter about quotes misattributed to Methodism founder John Wesley, such as "I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.” (Setting oneself ablaze is such an entirely un-Methodist thing to do, I don't know why that one persists.)
Oddly, in writing and publishing the story, some people were a little offended when they learned that there's no record that Wesley ever said, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” It's repeated so often that some felt he should have said it, I guess. Anyway, thank you for this, it is gold! I'm printing it out because this issue comes up often for me. In fact, I need to check a quote attributed to Verdi for a story I'm writing today.
I find this sort of detective work hugely fun, and it sounds like you do too!
Yes. Especially when your instinct tells you, “So-and-so never would’ve said that,” and you’re right.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
❤️
I would wear a "Kiss the Copy Editor" apron.
Bookmarks!
As soon as I started reading this, I wondered if you'd also run across the App That Will Not Be Named, which the Authors Guild is also looking into. Horrible, especially because the robots that were illegally fed our books to train them on language are now being used to misrepresent those very books.
Also, one of the proudest moments in my writing career was when I was able to demonstrate that Benjamin Franklin never wrote that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy...and also that he didn't actually invent a recipe for spruce beer, he merely copied it out of a cookbook into his notebook, as one does. Cheers to the librarians and archivists who helped me trace those all the way back to primary sources.
Cheers always to librarians and archivists.
I can't imagine how that App That Will Not Be Named can make a go of it. I mean, who's that stupid? (I know, I know, don't answer that question.) But I put great faith in the industriousness and diligence of my former colleagues at PRH—the legal and anti-piracy ones, particularly—who I know take this sort of thing seriously.
I have a 2010 book called "In the Words of Nelson Mandela" (Walker & Co) that includes a famous misattribution. You know the one: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure...," which belongs, alas, to Marianne Williamson. According to QI, the NYT wrote about the widespread misattribution in 1998 and the Nelson Mandela Foundation wrote about it in 2007, yet here it is in 2010 in an edited quote book. Who knows? Maybe they thought no one would want "In the Words of Nelson Mandela" if it didn't include his most famous quote. It means more when Mandela tells you you're powerful beyond measure or Wilde tells you to be yourself—or at least you're likelier to buy the T-shirt.
I just grunted “Ugh.”
That’s all I’ve got, really.
Ugh.
"Ugh." —Benjamin Dreyer
And you can quote me!
Oh. Wait. You just did.
I always keep this quote in mind when reading some of these qoutes:
"Don't believe everything you see on the Internet." --Abraham Lincoln
Re Sherwin-Williams: One of my junior-high classmates was the scion of a rival paint company. One day he solemnly informed me that the "Cover the Earth" slogan and image were the tipoff that Sherwin-Williams was a Communist front. Everyone knew it, this little pisher said.
Oh dear.
Hey, this was SO good. It was the opposite of waning and moribund, and an exemplar of how to write as yourself. For these reasons alone, I was punching the air, never mind the content, B Lillie, and a photo of Audrey Hepburn.
The richness to a reader of an author who is himself cannot be overestimated. Did I just write that: it reads like shite. But I’ll leave it in and try and explain.
Of course, I dig all the copywriting shtick, and all the ephemera you use to bring it to wonderful life; but what I find really does it for me as a reader is the sense that you are being you when you write. It’s kind of priceless, and makes reading you feel rewarding and pleasurable and multilayered (which is particularly interesting because of the glittering surface of language and content)
I’m now worried I’ve written myself into a gushing corner. Or that I look creepy. So I’ll click post before I just overgush. But if I have overgushed, at least I’ve followed your inspiration and been myself. And I’m really not creepy. Just a fan. In a good way.
I just had to refer to this while doing an edit and trying to find exactly where E Barreett Browning said something noble about hospitals. (In Aurora Leigh apparently.) Which I would not have found without recourse to Google Books so THANK YOU.
In a short story I'd drafted before reading this article, I'd made reference to Twain's "The rumors of my death . . . " I had checked that he said it, and found he said something in that vein but using different words. Every time I've read the line in the story, I've cringed, but Twain's language just didn't flow.
I don't know if I'll keep it, but I came up what I think is clever (and I know humor is hard to get right), adding the last phrase to the paragraph, possibly with a footnote to this post.
[The character, having just read in his bio, written by ChatGPT, that he died some years earlier.] He posted the obit on Facebook, adding Twain’s famous “The report of my death is exaggerated.” Moments later, his phone began to ping with condolences, memorials festooned with laughing and crying emojis, and *a note from his friend Benjamin that the quote captured Twain’s sentiment but wasn’t precisely what the man said.*
Well, at least one person thinks that this is very funny. ✋🏻
FYI, the story was accepted by HamLit and published today. (My first fiction in a juried anthology.) I kept the note directing readers to your essay. Should you be so inclined and curious: https://hamlit.org/the-order-of-lazarus/.
Thank you for underlining (providing a link) to phonus bolonus. I had no idea. And I’m absolutely starting a book of “great lines.”
I know, don’t start a sentence with “and” or “but.” I learned that from BD a week ago. It’s going to be one of the hardest habits to break. Ugh.
No, no, no, do start a sentence with "And" or "But" if it serves your purpose! Just do it: thoughtfully!
Thanks. Thoughtfully, indeed.