Fred's Book Club: Say What?

Welcome to the Humpback Writers portion of our week, the day we celebrate writers who are probably not hunchbacked, but whose books are being looked at on Wednesdays. Yeah, it's a stupid name for a book feature. And you can quote me on that.

Speaking of which, we have another nonfiction gem this week: 

Garson O'Toole is a lone voice crying truth on an Internet of stupidity, and out of gratitude I bought his book. It has a place of pride on my desk, and I use it and his Web site, Quote Investigator, frequently.

Why? Because writers are stupid and lazy.

I've done a lot of fact-checking in my editorial career, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the number one variety of false information that one encounters is not political fabrication, scientific misinformation, or spurious historical anecdote, but rather the humble quotation. I would guess that at least 75 percent of the quotes I have encountered in magazine and popular books are either made up, misattributed, misquoted, or just insane. Yes, political information is often skewed into error by bias (to say the least), and scientific studies are complex and often misquoted for sensation, and historical anecdotes are as poorly researched as anything, but quotations are so omnipresent, so easily thrown about in that swamp of e-ignorance called the Web, and so easy to get wrong, that they make up the bulk of misinformation in the world.

O'Toole seeks to set the record straight.

Certainly a good book of quotations is helpful for the task. For classic quotes you can find older versions of Bartlett's famous book online for free, and it has never gone out of print; a good library will have an unabridged version. And there are a number of more contemporary books of that kind available. I have the third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations on my desk right next to O'Toole's book.

But where O'Toole earns respect is by taking popular quotations, all memed up and scattered to the winds, and runs them to earth. Many of them have been misquoted in newspapers and magazines for decades. Sometimes there was an original quote that was just dumbed down progressively by writers until it is virtually unrecognizable. He follows the trail like a dogged detective, going through sources popular and unknown, to find the original quote if it can be found, by the original speaker if he can be found, and show how it got mangled into its current state.

Here's an example I literally pulled out of the book at random:

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song."

Can't you just see those words superimposed over a stock photo of a canary? Your college student or grandmother posting it on Facebook? But who said it? Was it a Chinese proverb? Was it Maya Angelou? It's one of the few that haven't been attributed to Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, or Winston Churchill, I'd wager.

O'Toole spends ten pages (including end notes) tracking this thing down, through the varieties that the idea had seen in print, including William Hazlitt ("the thrush ... does not sing because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or criticized. It sings because it is happy..."), Lord Tennyson ("I do not sing because I must,/And pipe but as the linnets sing"), newspapers, religious books, Up With People, Lou Holtz (!) ... and finds that the quote as it appears should be attributed to children's book author Joan Walsh Anglund. This is hours of work for a single line of verse; this is real scholarship, not like the "fact-checking" that happens at some of our well-known print institutions.

O'Toole should get a Pulitzer, and teach classes in this stuff to the know-nothings at J-school.

You know what kind of writers are the absolute worst about wrong quotations? Without question: authors of self-help books. The people who want to tell you how to change your life are the people who can't be bothered to double-check a stupid damn quotation in a reputable reference book. What does that tell you?

Worse, I'll bet they don't care. I've worked on such books and sent notes back to the editor, frequently with links to O'Toole's blog, and I would bet a hundred bucks that not a word of the misquotes would be changed. Because the self-help authors have no interest in the truth. Which is just what you want from someone telling you how to live your life.

Those creeps get rich while Garson O'Toole toils at the endless pile of misquotes, a supply of stupidity large enough to fill the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I don't know if he even sold enough copies of the book above to entice the publisher to contract for a sequel.

Let the quoter beware! Or as Socrates said, "If you see on the Internet that your mother says she loves you, don't believe it." And you can quote me on that.