If this were a government site, this item would be instantly deleted for use of the word equal. Maybe my whole column. Maybe my whole life on line. Maybe my social security checks. You get the idea.
While at MIT, I didn’t recognize the origin of the frequently used phrase “All things being equal, which, of course they never are.”
“All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.”
--William of Occam
I’m “Things are never as bad as we fear nor as good as we hope.”
--François Théodore Thistlethwaite
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“The answer to all question headlines is no.”
-- Ian Betteridge…
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“Every choice you make makes you.”
--John C. Maxwell
I need help finding a quotation. I think it was either Mencken or Twain. "If newspapers only reported what has happened, rather than what they think will happen, they would be half empty."
I believe the original was a complaint about the number of "expected to be..." stories in newspapers (and on TV for that matter). Kind of like horse-race campaign coverage, but more general. It is similar to Twain's quote: "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." (I only hope and pray that is true of the present)I tried to find it on the Internet, but it turns out that almost any query with the word newspaper in it simply serves up several dozen "newspapers are dead" or "newspapers are dying" links.
Help would be appreciated. Or comments on the subject for that matter.
Quote: Teach Your Children Well
While we teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.
--Angela Schwind
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Quote: Question Headlines
The answer to all question headlines is no.
-- Ian Betteridge…
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Quote: Choice
“Every choice you make makes you.”
--John C. Maxwell
What generally happens is that the came of Telephone that used to be the route for quotations, tended to shorten and polish them.
* Voltaire almost certainly never exactly said “I disapprove of what you say, but i will defend to the death your right to say it.” Still, it is a favorite of a vanishing breed: newspaper editorial pages.
* Mark Twain almost certainly never said, “If you don’t like New England weather, wait a minute.”
* During the years when I regularly walked the Harvard Bridge between Boston and MIT, I loved the quotation, attributed to an Arctic explorer that “the coldest I have ever been is on the Harvard Bridge in February.” If anyone actually ever said that, the Internet doesn’t know about it.
* For most of my life I have been attributing “People who talk of the dignity of labor have never done any” to AFL-CIO leader George Meany. I still contend he said it, even though the Internet disagrees. Turns out it is from G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman. I suggest the version I recall is pithier than the actual exchange.
Poet Octavius Robinson: “I believe in the dignity of labor.”
Chauffeur Enery Straker: “That's because you've never done any, Mr. Robinson.”
Virtually every quotation you know is either misattributed or inaccurate. Neither particularly matters. They last as quotes because they resonate with truth. Getting them exactly right or precisely attributed doesn’t make them any worse at expressing truths or humor.
For example, my freshman advisor told me:
“If you don’t stop spending so much time at the newspaper and the radio station you will have a mediocre academic career, taking the path of least resistance, just slipping by everything.”
Years later, when I started telling the anecdote, I quoted him as warning me that I was in “the twilight of a mediocre academic career”. It was only recently, when I discovered my freshman journal, that I realized I was misquoting him. I still tell the anecdote that way, because it is better. It appears in my 50th reunion book from MIT.
Misattributed quotes used to stay alive on the fact that that you generally can’t prove the negative. The Internet makes available nearly every word written by a great person, so at the very least you can say, “There is no record of them saying or writing that.”
To be continued
Setting Headlines
Thank You Reid Ashe. He knew the name of the device we used to set headlines at The Tech: VGC Photo Typositor.
Probably not the model shown, but similar. Ironically, the article is not about the device, but about the font used for the word Typositor on its frame.
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Passwords
Tom Rush’s Quote of the Month: “Someone cracked my password. Now I need to rename my puppy.”
–Unknown
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Dinosaur Blog
In a recent comic strip, the daughter sees the father reading a newspaper and says, “When are you going to be through reading your Dinosaur Blog?”
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Paul on the Top5
Little Known Features of Tesla’s Cybertruck. I snagged number 3 on a Top5 list.
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Paul Under The Knife
Not my hip. Not yet. Pacemaker battery replacement (they call it a generator replacement). A few days in the hospital, a useless left arm for three weeks. Low-risk surgery, worked fine.
“Not everything worthwhile can be measured, and not everything that can be measured is worthwhile.” Or, to put it another way, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Attributions for these quotes are so dubious I shan’t repeat them here. We’ll just let it go at anonymous.
Rumsfeld on France
Thank you Clark Smith. “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was apparently not fond of the French military. However mean-spirited but hilariously, he is reported to have observed:
“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion."
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Ancient Variation
That last quote reminds me of Gloria Steinem’s “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
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Fox News Defined
“Fox News is to journalism what the Mafia is to capitalism — same basic genre, but a morally corrupt perversion of the real thing.”
―Tom Friedman
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The American Voter
Voter: “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” Stevenson supposedly replied. “I need a majority.”
―Two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, apocryphal
“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor
I have been saying this of myself for decades, albeit not as succinctly. My late mother said the same thing was true for her.