Be Yourself

[a plea for authenticity]

[originally published July 11, 2024]

“When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.”

—William Shakespeare

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

—Oscar Wilde

“Grammar is a fence that keeps the cows of chaos from trampling the flower bed of prose.”

—Benjamin Dreyer

“Just wait a goddamn minute.”

—Stephen Sondheim

The internet, as you are no doubt already well aware, is awash with phony quotations promulgated by websites with names like BrainyQuote, QuoteFancy, Quotespedia, ad literally nauseam, often of the refrigerator door wisdom genre and thus easily manipulated into pretty nature memes, potpourri-stuffed pillows to be sold at Etsy, and the sorts of signs you might hang in your kitchen if the local tchotchke emporium was all out of “Live. Laugh. Love.”

It’s a weird thing, to put it mildly. Given the many eminently quotable—and actually actual—quotes that have burst from brains including William Shakespeare’s, Oscar Wilde’s, mine, Abraham Lincoln’s, Mark Twain’s, Albert Einstein’s, Dorothy Parker’s, etc., etc., and indeed etc., one can’t, or at least I can’t, imagine that there’s a void crying out to be filled by the concoction of little mcnuggets of would-be profundity to be crammed into the mouths of people who would presumably have rather choked to death on them than spat them out as utterances.¹

If it’s any consolation to you, this peculiar phenomenon predates our online existences by a good bit, and in illustration of that point I would commend to you the work of the great Garson O’Toole, who, as Quote Investigator, has devoted himself to tracking the tortuous paths of not only the Shakespeare and Wilde forgeries cited above but also more authentic if sometimes uncertainly or imprecisely rendered remarks like the dying Oscar’s celebrated wallpaper quip and Beatrice Lillie’s much beloved, especially by me, “You may tell the butcher’s wife that Lady Peel has finished.”

In my former career as copy chief, I and my colleagues often found ourselves wrestling with writers who, having picked up some fortune cookie refugee from Jack Lord knows where and decided that it would make an ideal book epigraph,² resisted being dissuaded by the revelation that their pithy bit of Voltaire³ or Emerson was no such thing at all and who would then embark on what you might call Bartlett’s Familiar Stages of Quotation Grief, starting with “But I found it online, so it must be real!”⁴ and then proceeding through “What if I say ‘popularly attributed to’?” and “Can we go with ‘anonymous’?” and ending, I have no doubt, in muttered imprecations once I’d successfully managed to put my big copy chief foot down and keep it down.⁵

Now, why a writer should want to disseminate inarguably phonus balonus quotations is another conundrum that’s several degrees beyond my former or for that matter present pay grade to solve,⁶ but perhaps suffice it to say that, to the best of my recollection, these counterfeit quotations tended to appear in the manuscripts of the subset of books that eventually find themselves shelved in your local B&N under Self-Help/Inspiration or Business. (I’m thinking right now of a quip quipped at me by my late and much beloved colleague Dan Menaker: “The very existence of self-help books is all the evidence you need that they don’t work.”)

You, my dear readers, are certainly not the type to ever wittingly propagate a forgery, and to help make sure that you also don’t do it unwittingly, here’s a string of advice:

• If you run across a quotation attributed to someone who spent their entire life writing things down and the quotation is not accompanied by the title of a book or some other specifically named source, please proceed immediately to Quotation Defcon 4, or possibly Quotation Defcon 3.⁷ Because this situation is probably about to get ugly.

• Then what you want to do with that dubious-looking quotation is to google it—y’know, slap it between quote marks, hit return, and see what pops up. If your first nine hits are quotes sweatshops, Goodreads,⁸ and Forbes.com, I’ll lay you 7 to 1 you’ve got some prize horsepucky on your hands.

• And then: Take advantage of the marvelous Disputed and Misattributed sections of the myriad Wikiquote entries devoted to just about everyone who ever set pen to paper. The debunkings you’ll find there are thorough, devastating, and inarguable.

• You might, as a last resort, also make good use of the eminently searchable Google Books, where I’ve occasionally been able to sleuth my way to something that somehow hadn’t managed to make it to Wikiquote or anywhere else definitive. (Be careful, though, if you’re finding quotations quoted in just the sorts of books that smell, even through your computer screen, of inauthenticity. Their numbers are legion and getting legioner every day.)

These four points should, I think, cover the earth.

Best logo ever, or best. logo. ever.?

If you’re in the copyediting racket, you probably already have lots of practice with these techniques. If you’re a writer who wants to gussy up an article, term paper, or book with pithy epigraphs—and, really, who doesn’t like a pithy epigraph, or even two pithy epigraphs set against each other in amusingly paradoxical juxtaposition?⁹—I might add this:

Open up a Word file, or even buy an old-school paper-and-binding notebook, and every day that you’re doing your day’s reading and happen upon some smart, hilarious, or simply lovely bit of prose (or poetry!) that captivates you: Write it down. A, you’ve just embarked on the enduring adventure of creating a commonplace book. B, you’ll eventually have a collection of smart, hilarious, or simply lovely bits of prose (or poetry!) that you may one day be able to pass on as load-bearing decor in something you yourself have written, and that decor will then be real, and personal, and anything but commonplace.

Oh, before I forget. That . . . thing . . . up above, with my name following it? I didn’t write that, perish the thought. That comes to us courtesy of the website of an app I choose not to name here—though I’m happy to note that my publisher’s attorneys are now aware of its existence—that is in the business of hawking book summaries—presumably AI-generated, nonsensical and inauthentic (and tedious and interminable; I mean, just read the freaking book, why don’t you), and littered with quotes, each and every one of them a fake—to the sorts of tried-and-true fools who have been eagerly parted from their money since time immemorial.¹⁰ To quote (authentically) one writer friend who similarly found himself being assigned clangingly tin-eared prose: “I wouldn’t have written that at knifepoint.” And to quote another: “If I had written that, I would have organized my own firing squad.”¹¹

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Department of A Fellow’s Got to Eat

Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way. Which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,¹² in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something that you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant. I am profoundly grateful. And if you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “You know what? I like this guy” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.

And I dunno, maybe there should be T-shirts. Or “Kiss the Copy Editor” aprons. We’ll see.

Have a swell rest of the day, week, weekend.

Benjamin

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Cover photograph: Oscar Wilde photographed by Napoleon Sarony

1. The collected works of Shakespeare, depending upon what precisely you consider the collected works of Shakespeare and who’s doing the counting, comprise some 885,000-odd words. They are, each and every one of them, googlable. If you can’t find a string of words specifically assigned to a Shakespearean play or to a Shakespearean poem (or to that second-best Shakespearean last will and testament, I suppose), they’re not Shakespeare’s. It’s as simple as that.

2. Many years ago, back in my freelance days, I proofread a book whose epigraph was a misquotation of a Cole Porter song—a misquotation that had also been adapted into the book’s title. Of course I pointed out the error, in that smugly bloodthirsty manner of proofreaders since time immemorial, while also wondering how the misquotation had already gotten as far as it had gotten. (To tell you the truth, the rest of the book, from the quality of its prose to the aim of its accuracy, pretty much demonstrated how that had happened.) Ultimately, I learned, the epigraph page was corrected by the time the book was published; the book’s title was not. Shrug emoji goes here.

3. Speaking of Voltaire, I’d like to offer you one more bit of sleuthing by the great Quote Investigator. I have particular fondness for this one because I participated in it. It’s twisty and turny and deeply bonkers.

4. “For the love of God, Montresor!” —Edgar Allan Poe

5. An appreciative shoutout to the author who, confronted with the fact that his novel’s epigraph had not been written by the person he wanted it to have been written by, eventually agreed to keep the epigraph—as I recall, it was an amusing and even erudite remark; it simply didn’t have a traceable source—and present it sourcelessly: no “popularly attributed to,” no “anonymous,” just, as one might say of a tumbler of scotch, neat. And really, that’s the larger point right there, isn’t it: A wise remark is perfectly wise even if it wasn’t remarked by dear Henry David Thoreau or dear Albert Einstein or even, and I shudder to mention her but I must, dear Audrey Hepburn, who didn’t emit one twentieth of the treacle the quote sites have assigned to her.

(Audrey's the pretty one in the turtleneck.)

6. Of course I know why it happens at online forums such as this one: IT’S THE CLICKS, BABY.

7. Speaking of things that drive me a bit bonkers, as I seem almost always to be doing, the Defcon scale (the actual one, that is) runs from 5 (a hangnail) to 1 (prepare to die), not the other way around. And there’s thus no such thing as “Oh my god, Defcon 10!!”

8. Goodreads is not these days entirely a horrible source of quotes, but I would never circulate anything I found there without double- and triple-checking it.

9. Three successive epigraphs is a lot of epigraphs. I’m just saying.

10. See also, courtesy of the App That Will Not Be Named Except Hopefully in a Cease-and-Desist Letter: “Never underestimate the power of a well-placed expletive, but use them sparingly in formal writing.” A, that should be “the power of well-placed expletives, but use them” etc. B, thanks for the advice, now go %$!@ yourself.

11. If you want to amuse yourself, and if you find this sort of thing amusing, take a Google dive down the rabbit hole of Dante’s alleged “hottest places in hell” quote and John F. Kennedy’s role in enshrining it in unreal reality.

12. And Sallie’s!