The Art of "Quotemanship" and "Misquotemanship" | Quoting people accurately is really hard — and you can quote me on that.

by Frank Herron
0 comments

The Intentional Misquote, sometimes buried in a journalist’s HANDBAG of tricks

There’s a sometimes-effective tool that journalists use that I can only call “the intentional misquote.” There’s nothing nefarious about it. Rather, it’s a literary device of sorts that allows a journalist to make a clever turn on a familiar phrase. Or, on a lower level, it’s a quick and easy way to try to convince a reader that a journalist might actually be familiar with a passage from a book or a poem or a speech or a plaque or a Hallmark card. Preliminary indications lead me to believe that there’s something distinctly British about this, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
The humorous Petronella Wyatt used “the intentional misquote” in a very funny piece about handbags in today’s editions of London’s The Mail (“What’s in your bag, Ma’am, Apart from the chocolate, the plasters and the gin…”)
Here’s how she began it:

For men, a handbag is a thing apart, for women ’tis their whole existence, to misquote Byron and to echo the sentiments of Judge Zoe Smith, who told a handbag thief at Reading Crown Court last Week that stealing a woman’s bag ‘is not just inconvenience, it causes fear as well….

In that opening line, Wyatt mentioned Lord Byron, whom I have included here, in Albanian dress–a totally irrevelant homage to the recent Expendables 2 movie).
Wyatt doesn’t mention the source, which is Byron’s lengthy Don Juan. The passage to which she refers is from Stanza 194 of Canto I:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
‘Tis woman’s whole existence.

Wyatt, therefore, has replaced “man’s love” with “the handbag”–a suitable switch given the satiric nature of the original verse. I didn’t mind scurrying to Google to figure out more about the quotation, but a mention of the original poem might have been appropriate. I might be the only one in this position, but I don’t have Lord Byron, for example, at either my beck or my call. Then again, English readers have a lot more grounding in poetry than I. It might simply be my problem.
If so, thanks for the assist from Google and Bing and the rest of the search-engineers.

by Frank Herron
1 Comment

The CONTEXT needs to be screwed, bolted, nailed and glued to Obama’s “You didn’t built that” comment

The Republican National Convention has effectively dismantled an original statement to come up with its “We Built It” campaign. The effort has its foundation in a statement President Barack Obama made in Virginia on July 13. The single sentence that sparked it: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
That statement, on its own, is all the hammer-and-tong-wielding GOP want people to hear.
Pulllleeeeze.
It begs context.
That’s what Joe Berland of San Rafael, California, called for in a letter published in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday (Aug. 30).
In his letter he chastised columnist Debra J. Saunders–who used the one-sentence quote while writing about the convention–for using the sentence, as quoted and shorn of context, in her column on Aug. 29.
Berland says the preceding sentences need to be screwed, bolted, nailed and glued to the “you didn’t build that” statment. He gives it this way:

“Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system…that allowed you to thrive.
“Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that.“

Berland is saying, of course, the THAT (which the business builder didn’t build) actually refers to the “American system… roads and bridges.”
Berland’s voice-in-the-wilderness plea at the end of his letter bears repeating:

“Our country would be so much greater if we would argue the facts rather than distort the words of our opposition.”

If fairness to Saunders, the Chronicle columnist, I think the well-intentioned letter-writer took her statement a bit out of context, himself. Referring the Tampa convention’s “We Built It” theme, she wrote:

“This is the Republican response to President Obama’s assertion in July that successful people didn’t succeed without help from teachers, mentors and government: ‘If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that’.”

It certainly would have been easy for her to add that the statement has been taken out of context, but she did provide some of the president’s thinking preceding the quote.
For the record, an editorial in Thursday’s Anniston Star provided more of the context for the Obama statement, from that July 13 speech:

“Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. … If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

He then said, according to the White House transcript of the speech (which eliminates some repeated words and expands some contractions for some reason):

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

There’s plenty of opportunity to build, right?

This YouTube clip includes only the “you didn’t build that” statement.

IF you have about 42 minutes, here’s a YouTube presentation of the whole speech.

by Frank Herron
7 Comments

It’s a MUCH More Effective Quotation to Attribute It to Aristotle, Rather than to Will Durant

Yesterday, longtime offensive lineman Matt Light (left, bearded) announced his retirement from the New England Patriots. During the moving and humorous ceremony, he turned to a quotation attributed to Aristotle (right, also bearded).
Light ended his prepared remarks this way, according to a transcript from espn.com [emphasis added]:

I kind of wanted to end it with this. I always look to something that someone else has said. When I was looking through a list of different quotes, I found one from Aristotle. It was fitting to not only where I’m at in my life, but experiences I’ve had in this organization, but all the people I’ve met: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” We hear it here five thousand times a week. Just worry about yourself, not others, make it part of your routine. Keep striving to do it better and better. The excellence we all shared as an organization, teammates, friends, everyone else. It’s not just as an act, it’s a habit, it’s how we live our lives, what we try to do day-in and day-out. I hope this habit continues. Thank you.

Journalist Julian Benbow described it this way in his recap about the retirement ceremony, which was posted at 12:32 p.m. Monday on Boston.com.

Light said while he was preparing his speech, he pored over quotes until he found one from Aristotle that sounded like a philospher’s [sic] translation of something Belichick says over and over again.
“You are what you do repeatedly,” the philosopher said. “So your excellence isn’t an act, it’s a habit.”

The quotation was also mentioned in the Web site of the Boston Herald in this summary:

Light ended with a favorite quote from Aristotle: ”We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

The sentiment certainly sounds great. And it sounds like something that should adorn a wall at Foxboro Stadium.
The trouble is that ARISTOTLE DID NOT SAY IT.
As far as I can tell, those words were actually written by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers.
In part VII of that book, dealing with “Ethics and the Nature of Happiness,” Durant sums up some of Aristotle’s thoughts. After quoting a phrase from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (“these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”), Durant sums it up this way: “…we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.” Then he quotes again from Aristotle’s work. The footnotes 1 and 2 in the excerpt at left refer to passages in Aristotle’s Ethics, ii, 4. (The passage at left is from Page 87 of an edition of Durant’s book that bubbled up in GoogleBooks. One explanation of the misattribution is in this Wikipedia entry.)
This is an example of the way that provocative words tend to gravitate toward famous mouths. As the great quote-sleuth Ralph Keyes wrote in The Quote Verifier: “clever lines … routinely travel from obscure mouths to prominent ones….”
In this case, the journey was from the North Adams, Mass., native Durant (right), who lived from 1885 to 1981, to Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BC.
I’m not faulting Matt Light. For one thing, it’s refreshing to hear the word “Aristotle” in an NFL-related press conference. He was probably using an Internet source such as BrainyQuote, which wrongly attributes the comment to Aristotle.
Journalists, however, who pride themselves on “checking the facts” should not be lazy about passing on–unthinkingly–such misattribution.
Remember the shopworn journalistic bromide: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

by Frank Herron
12 Comments

Jefferson’s Second-Amendment “Quote” Demands a Second Opinion

A letter in today’s Financial Times draws attention to a shopworn “quote” that’s often attributed to Thomas Jefferson (right) and used to buttress arguments for a broad application of the right to bear arms (or brandish automatic weapons). The letter-writer (Dennis Oveis of Tampa, Fla.) takes a previous letter-writer to task for invoking what that previous letter-writer called a “timeless quote from Thomas Jefferson.” The alleged statement is:

The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.

Oveis checked with web site for Jefferson’s Monticello for help in authenticating the quote. The site says:

We currently have no evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote ‘The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it’ or any of its listed variations.

Wikipedia’s entry on the Second Amendment says the quotation is one of many misattributed to Jefferson. It says the quote can’t be found before 2007, the year it surfaced in a book by Matt Carson, On A Hill They Call Capital: A Revolution Is Coming.

by Frank Herron
1 Comment

President’s Challenge Exposes a Misquotation at the Highest Level

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 debt.” In his build-up to the statement, President Obama explicitly said, “I’m quoting her.” After hearing the totally expected “boos” raining down on his report of her words, he challenged the wired group to “Google her or what have you.”

Well, that challenge really isn’t such a good idea. Such an act of Googling (which was made a little tougher because the president neglected to give the name of the congresswoman) reveals that he OMITTED SOME KEY WORDS in his “quoting” of her.
Here’s the exchange, according to a transcript from the Denver Post:

THE PRESIDENT: I want to read a quote. This is from a Republican congresswoman. I didn’t really understand this. (Laughter.) I’m quoting her. She said that she has “very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt… because there’s no reason for that.” She said, students who rack up student loan debt are just sitting on their butts, having opportunity “dumped in your lap.”
AUDIENCE: Booo —
THE PRESIDENT: You guys can Google her or what have you, but — (laughter) —

The great site factcheck.org points out the misrepresentation of Rep. Virginia Foxx (Republican, North Carolina), who was speaking on the G. Gordon Liddy radio show on April 12. That site gives the quote. It might be better to listen to the recording on YouTube:

This gives a little more context for her statement. Before getting to the statement that the president muddied, she refers to her own college-debt experience. Noting that she and her husband were totally on their own at the time, she says “he” borrowed $1,500 for college, and it took them quite a while to pay it back. Clearly, from the context of her own life and the context of the quote, SOME debt is nearly unavoidable. (And, back when she was in college, $1,500 was a pretty big number.) Removing a couple of “uh’s”, here’s what she said, according to the YouTube clip:

I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We all, again, we live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ You don’t sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap.

Now, with that as background, here’s how the president carved it up, with the words he deleted crossed out. He said Foxx said she has:

“very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with ~~$200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of~~ debt because there’s no reason for that.”

Look what he left out. He cut out the very important qualifying words that show Foxx is talking about the students who graduate with INCREDIBLY HIGH debt loads. Many graduate with debt levels far less than $80,000 or $200,000. He then replaced the next 39 words with a paraphrase and stuck on a four-word snippet from the end of her comment. His paraphrase is here:

She said, students who rack up student loan debt are just sitting on their butts, having opportunity “dumped in your lap.”

We grade this an F, but we will not charge any tuition for the lesson.

by Frank Herron
0 comments

An Accurate Quote Is Elusive, Even When the Original Is Inches Away

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 musical. On the jump page, on column 3, the Globe includes a reproduction of a very early “smoking-gun” use of the word (or one VERY CLOSE in spelling)–from a 1931 edition of the Daily Orange, the student newspaper at Syracuse University. It’s on the left in the photo above. The next column over, the writer quotes from that excerpt. The trouble is, the quotation is not completely accurate. The statement from the 1931 student newspaper:

I’ll admit it’s rather long and tiring before one reaches its conclusion.

In the body of the article, the writer changes the next-to-last word–from “its” to “the.” This does NOT affect the meaning, but it really should be the same. Especially in an article often devoted to the subtleties of language.
This one is a bit hard to swallow. Even a spoonful of sugar can’t help.
For some memories, you can hear Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews go through it:

by Frank Herron
0 comments

Perils of Punctuation: Even Though the Words Were Correct, a Period Killed the Accuracy

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 for spotting errors by the media. He does not limit himself to examining quotations only. His book, and blog, share the title: Regret the Error. It’s worth tracking.]
The correction, printed in The Australian on Monday 16 April sums it up well:

DUE to a production error, a quote attributed to Lieutenant Colonel Ghulam Jehlani Shafiq in a report in The Weekend Australian on Saturday (“Afhanistan batles scourge of corruption”, page 16) was altered to change its meaning. Colonel Jehlani did not say: “It’s not like 25 years ago. I was killing everybody.” In fact, he said: “It’s not like 25 years ago I was killing everybody. At that time too we tried not to have civilian casualties.” The Australian apologises for the error.

The statute of limitations, of course, doesn’t help here.
To, perhaps, better illustrate how utterly damaging that type of error is, it might help to see how it originally appeared in print. That’s a screen capture of it at below:

Ah, the good old days! When you could kill everybody! Ouch.

by Frank Herron
0 comments

Misquoting Numbers Is Easy; It’s Like Shooting Oil in a Barrel!

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 recovery misquoted a Bentek Energy report on projected production levels. The report forecast that U.S. oil production would increase by 2.2 million barrels a day by 2016.

So, what was the error?
As is the policy at many papers, the correction neglected to tell the reader what, exactly, was being corrected.
Was the year wrong? Did the earlier article say the increase in production could be realized by 2018? Or 2015? Or 3016?
Or was the number of barrels-per-day wrong? Did it say the increase would be 2.3 million barrels a day? Or 2.0 million? Or 3.2 million?
How big an error was it?
Well, it was a monstrous error. A true gusher.
Instead of 2.2 million barrels, the original article said

“U.S. production should surpass 2.2 billion barrels a day….”

That’s right: “2.2 BILLION barrels.”
That should have struck ANYONE as a crazy-big number. Worldwide consumption in 2010, I believe, was a little UNDER 90 MILLION barrels A DAY. If the 2.2 BILLION BARRELS A DAY increase in U.S. production is right, our energy troubles would disappear over a weekend.
Advice to journalists and editors, and readers: When you see the word BILLION, take a deep breath and break out the calculator. Or go to Google or Bing….
Millions and billions are not to be confused.
It takes a THOUSAND millions to reach a SINGLE billion. Confusing a million and a billion is like confusing a three-mile drive from Boston to Cambridge with a three-thousand mile drive from Boston to San Francisco.
The Sunday article, about hydraulic fracturing, carried this headline: “Drilling method low risk, valuable.” I’m not sure about the drilling risks of hydraulic fracturing, but I am sure of the risks that surface when journalists are entrusted with numbers. Those risks are high. Ask for a second opinion.

by Frank Herron
1 Comment

Saved by the Tape: British Lord Did NOT Issue a Bounty for Heads of Obama and Bush

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 capture of President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush.
Here’s how that offer was presented in The Express Tribune of Pakistan under a headline of ” ‘Sterling’ bounty offered for Bush, Obama” as published on 15 April and written by “Our Correspondent.”

“If the US can announce a reward of $10 million for the captor of Hafiz Saeed, I can announce a bounty of 10 million pounds on President Obama and his predecessor George Bush,” Lord Nazir said, adding that he would arrange the bounty at any cost even if he was left with the option of selling all his personal assets, including his house.

The quoted statement so alarmed Britain’s Labour Party that the organization immediately suspended him pending a formal inquiry. Lord Ahmed (aka Baron Ahmed of Rotherham, Britain’s first Muslim life peer) denied this vehemently and, according to the BBC, said he, too, was “horrified” by the report. Here’s what he told the BBC:

“I’m shocked and horrified that this whole story could be just made up of lies…” he said.
“I never mentioned President Obama, I never mentioned the word bounty.
“It was a discussion about people investing in Pakistan and yes, I did talk about illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Bush and Blair involved in it, but I did not mention any bounty or President Obama, and the sort of rubbish that’s been on the media in the last 24 hours.”

He may have been “shocked and horrified” by the story, but he should be aware that previous inflammatory comments of his have laid the groundwork. Evidently journalists found the report that he would call for such a bounty to be BELIEVABLE. I’m not excusing the error at all, I’m just saying that his name has been linked to people who might make such a statement.
Anyway, the lord said he had video footage of his remarks and that he would make it available to the Labour Party and the public.
The Express Tribune reviewed footage of the comments. It turns out, according to the paper’s correction, which was printed on 18 April, that Nazir said he wanted to

“raise and offer £10 million so that George W Bush and Tony Blair can be brought to the International Court of Justice on war crimes charges.”
There was NO MENTION of President Barack Obama. The correction adds:

The Express Tribune’s reporter, who covered the story in Haripur, also clarified that he had mistakenly written the name of Obama – and clarified that the offer by Nazir aimed to raise money to try Bush and Blair in the International Court of Justice for war crimes. The error is deeply regretted.

As well it should be–regretted. But it’s very hard to “unring the bell” and “put the toothpaste back into the tube” and all that.
It’s generally a good idea to make your own recording.

by Frank Herron
0 comments

A Helluva, er, Heckuva Way to Add Heat and Emotion to a Quotation

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 of the people who are upset about the mining plans. Here’s the correction:

A story about planned coal mines in Rhea County in the Sunday, April 8, edition misquoted Dayton Mountain resident Linda Milliron. What Milliron actually said was misheard by reporter Pam Sohn. What she said was: “But now my dream is just gone, you know?”

The original article carried a double byline. The correction gave the name of the reporter who made the mistake. That’s kind of rare. What’s not rare is that the correction followed the very non-transparent practice of NOT reprinting the original error. In light of that, the correction begs a question about the way the quotation was presented. Here’s how the statement appeared on 8 April, in the article (shown above and at the right):

“This 200 acres is what I want to leave my children. But now my dream is just gone to hell. Nobody wants to live close to a coal processing plant.”

Somehow the “But now my dream is just gone, you know?” became “But now my dream is just gone to hell.” What did she say? Only a recording can reveal it for sure. (Did the woman complain because she was rattled to see such a statement as “gone to hell” in print?) It’s quite a leap from “…you know…” to “…to hell…” Without a recording, I guess “misheard” covers it.
As often happens to a quotation, the change adds strength and/or emotion and/or certainty to a statement. (Something I like to call a “steroid quote”.) The phrase “gone to hell” certainly adds some heat to the woman’s statement.
Adding to the misquote problem here is the way in which her over-heated statement was featured in the paper.
Yes, it appeared not in the article–buried on page A11.
The “gone to hell” quotation so impressed the editors that it was used as part of the design of the front page (see close-up at right). It’s under the main headline on the front page–in BRIGHT RED, just like some BURNING COAL.