Quoting people accurately is really hard — and you can quote me on that.
Posted in Out-of-context quote on Apr 29th, 2012
Trying to curry favor among debt-riddled students during a speech on Tuesday April 24 at the Coors Events Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, President Obama (shown above at the event) told the campus crowd that a “Republican congesswoman” said she had “very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with [...]
Posted in Already Published Quotes, Quoting published material on Apr 24th, 2012
There was a very interesting story by language expert Ben Zimmer in Sunday’s Boston Globe about the origin of the memorable word from Disney’s Mary Poppins film: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Anyway, the article sails along, telling a tale of the murky–and disputed–origins of the word, which burst on the scene with the release of the 1964 Disney [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 23rd, 2012
Vigilant media watchdogger Craig Silverman, in his column in the Toronto Star on Saturday 21 April, points out how the addition of a period put a horrible twist to the words of an officer in the Afghan military, Ghulam Jehlani Shafiq (left, as pictured in The Australian on 14 April). [Silverman has quite a reputation [...]
Posted in Quoting published material on Apr 21st, 2012
A correction appeared Thursday (18 April) in the Austin American-Statesman regarding a “misquote” of a report from Bentek Energy, described as a Colorado energy market analytics company. The error occurred in a commentary on Sunday. The paper printed the correction this way: A story on Page E1 Sunday about hydralic tracturing for oil and gas [...]
Posted in Recorded Quotes on Apr 19th, 2012
A controversial British parliamentarian of Kashmiri origin, Lord Nazir Ahmed (shown here), had a tough week trying to undo some damage done by a misquote. As reported by The Telegraph of London, he was suspended on Sunday (16 April) by his Labour Party after a report that he had offered a 10-million-pound bounty for the [...]
Posted in Steroid quote on Apr 19th, 2012
Things are heating up in Tennessee as residents of Dayton Mountain deal with the prospects of the return of deep-mining coal operations. A big article appeared (right) in the 8 April edition of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Nine days later, on the 17th of April, the CTFP corrected a quotation it printed from one [...]
Posted in Recorded Quotes, Uncategorized on Apr 18th, 2012
A column by soccer-writer Mninawa Ntloko of South Africa’s Business Day deals with the recent firing of Vladimir Vermezovic (right), coach of the South African Premier Soccer League’s Kaizer Chiefs. The article, published on 18 April, chronicles a stormy relationship the coach had with the media and others. Ntloko recalled the time when the coach [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 16th, 2012
Actress Kamna Jethmalani might have used an inappropriate term of endearment for Lord Venkateswara (a form of the Hindu god Vishnu). Now she is playing both the “misquote” and “out of context” card in her attempts to distance herself from her statement, according to an article in the Deccan Chronicle of 13 April. She was [...]
Posted in Properly handled quotes on Apr 14th, 2012
Earlier this week in the Guardian, writer John Crace (right) interviewed boxer Mike Tyson (above) for the Guardian newspaper. The interview was published this week (10 April) and was headlined “Mike Tyson: ‘Why are you asking me about pigeons?’” Crace found that he was lucky to be well out of range of Tyson’s devastating reach. [...]
Posted in Historic Quote on Apr 13th, 2012
An editorial in the Chattanooga Times Free Press of 13 April 2012 refers to a classic comment attributed to longtime U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois) (left). Dirksen’s topic–the same as the editorial, titled “Deficit Talk About Real Money”–was irresponsible deficit spending by the federal government. The editorial puts it this way: One version of the [...]