Pluto and misquotes

[mmcirvin]

james_nicoll links to an interesting paper on Pluto's moons, then somebody mentions that something he said on Usenet in 1990 is commonly misattributed to Booker T. Washington. I've seen myself quoted as "Anonymous" once or twice, but Nicoll has clearly hit the big time.

Comments

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

I'm still befuddled as to how it got attributed to Booker T. Washington. I can't imagine him saying anything quotable with the word "whore" in it.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

And that "mathilde" chick (who I won't link to here) just won't admit that she's been attributing the quote wrong. Reminds me of when I used that "defend to the death" quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall in my .sig and got so many people on Usenet arguing with me about it that I just changed my .sig.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Did you know that James's quote is peddled on a T-shirt? Without attribution?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

For me, the big time was the Quotation being used in a PRC ESL text, using the origin of words to help students learn English. That's the first thing the students see when they open the book.

Just think, millions of Chinese learning English may have first learned the meaning of "cribhouse whore" from me.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The word "cribhouse" seems to be pretty uncommon; references to it found by Google are overwhelmingly dominated by sources repeating this quotation.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, the thing I said that was widely quoted enough to become "Anonymous" was

“But IE3 is almost completely extinct, whereas Netscape 4’s undead corpse still shambles about the earth wreaking a horrific vengeance upon the living.”

which was immediately .sig-quoted by a bunch of web designers. (I discovered later that I'd probably been inspired by Alan J. Flavell's reference to Netscape 4 as an "undead corpse" a few months earlier.)

Hardly anyone repeats this quote any more because it is pretty much no longer true. The key thing is to produce a memorable quote that stands a good chance of remaining true for the next thousand years.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and by the old "Book of Mozilla" about: page text.

[(Anonymous)]

This is the one thing I know of that I wrote which has subsequently taken on a life of its own. (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22When+my+grandmother+got+arthritis,+she+couldn't+bend+over+and+paint+her+toenails+anymore.+So+my+grandfather+does+it+for+her+all+the+time,+even+when+his+hands+got+arthritis+too.+Then+she+gives+him+a+hand-job.+That's+love%22)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here's a search that gets the whole sentence (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=%22When+my+grandmother+got+arthritis%22+%2B%22hand-job%22&btnG=Search)...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

(Google seems to have a limit on the number of keywords it'll accept, so putting in that many just gets you the glurgey version.)

[paraleipsis.livejournal.com]

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," or words to that effect. (http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote.html)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That is fascinating. Especially the follow-up essay, in which the fake quote is revealed to have been spread by an old edition of Bartlett's.

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

"There's something rotten in the state of Denmark" is the lousiest allegedly quotable quote in the universe, unless you count the crap they stick in quote marks AND italics for the "Movie Memories" before the trailers before the movies at the theater. Quotes like that are evocative of the quote-picker with a fork in her neck. (The font is like chartreuse and half of the quotes are from chick-flicks, of course it's a her.) Also the blurbs on the back of cheap reprints of copyright-expired classics. Also the backs of some cereal boxes.

Sorry for the interruption. I like to talk to myself where others can hear.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think that line showed up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon once. It's possible that that is why it gets quoted so much.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

A friend recently raised the awful spectre of AFI's Top 100 Movie Quotes (http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx) and the Bravo TV show that accompanied it. Rather than, say, 100 good quotes, for people who like movie quotes and trade them with their friends, it was rather more like "If you've heard one quote from each of these 100 famous movies, this is the quote you probably heard."

So instead of Bluto's impassioned speech about the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor in "Animal House," you get "Toga! Toga!" from a forgettable part of the quotable movie. "Toga! Toga!"? Try to pick a more bland quote from that movie. "Double-Secret Probation?" maybe "I'm a zit!" Nope, it can't be done.