Who Said That?

One of the pesky things with which journalists wrestle is verbatim statements by sources -- as indicated by quote marks.

Reporters are tightly restricted. Get it first. Get it all. Get it right.

Editorialists have a little leeway. Get going. Get to the point. Get to a conclusion.

Feature writers my role in this space are expected to background quotes. Are they true, original, and pertinent?

Over the years I have accumulated a plethora of quotes lost, stolen or strayed. Herein some house cleaning with assistance of my trusty Bartletts Familiar Quotations.

Who today does not thrill to that line from President John F. Kennedys inaugural speech?

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what can you do for your country.

That line has a long history of service for politicians. It was first given voice by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1884 as an associate justice of the Massachusetts State supreme court. Shortly thereafter he was named a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a Union veteran in the Civil War, he was asked to address the John Sedgwick Post, Grand Army of the Republic. He said:

Stripped of the temporary associations which gave rise to it, it is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.

This noble sentiment was echoed in 1904 by LeBaron Russell Briggs writing in College Life. He said: As has often been said, the youth who loves his Alma Mater will always ask not What can she do for me? but What can I do for her?

Warren G. Harding cemented the thought into the political lexicon in his speech before the Republican National Convention, Chicago, in 1916: In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it, and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.

Hardings speech electrified the convention and launched him to public notice that resulted in his election as president in 1920. Lincoln And Stevenson

Abraham Lincoln had a knack of expressing important thoughts in homey ways. When asked by a Leslies Weekly reporter how he felt about the 1862 elections in which Republicans lost many congressional seats because the Civil War was going badly -- Lincoln replied:

I feel somewhat like the boy in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.

Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic candidate in 1952 for the presidency against ultimate winner Dwight Eisenhower. When Stevenson was asked how he felt about losing, he recalled Lincoln:

I feel like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark who was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.

Famous Misquotes

Another challenge for proper use of quote marks is remarks so apt they enter the public domain and get massaged over the years. In the trade, journalists call them misquotes. Wrong wording, but permissible by common usage. Quote marks optional.

Misquotes generally are shorthand versions that get to the point quicker and stick in the mind longer.

To express hopeless love, we like to repeat a command by Humphrey Bogart in the movie Casablanca.

While depressed about a former sweetheart, he asks his nightclub pianist, Sam, to play and sing a sad song reminiscent of her. Sam concludes but Bogart is remembered as pleading: Play it again, Sam.

The actual line -- when Sam protested having to repeat a depressing love song -- was simply a curt: Play it!

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We all know that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. That bit of wisdom is distilled from a play The Mourning Bride by William Congreave in 1697.

The actual line, however, is: Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.

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William Shakespeare, the immortal bard, still gets refined by modern would-be dramatists. We say: Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.

In the play Hamlet, the main character laments to a companion about a human skull retrieved from a shallow grave: Alas poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.

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Even the Christian Bible gets rearranged occasionally by common usage. We often say: Money is the root of all evil.

The King James version, Timothy I, records it more thoughtfully as: The love of money is the root of all evil.

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The most famous misquote is attributed to Baseball Hall of Fame player and manager Leo Durocher if we can take him at his word.

When he became manager of the last-place Chicago Cubs in 1966 he is alleged to have told his players: Nice guys finish last!

Whatever he said, during the next six years the Cubs finished second four times, third once and fourth once.

In later years he hotly denied the popular quote. I never said that. I said that if I was playing third base, and my mother rounded third with the winning run, Id trip her up.

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Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II, was a superb, creative orator. Yet, he was misquoted often, and did not hesitate to embellish well-known phrases by others.

In the unrest in South Africa leading to the Boer War of 1899-1902, Churchill was a press correspondent. In one of his dispatches he supposedly said: Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at and missed.

Pragmatists today miss the wry understatement of his actual words: shot at without result.

His famous blood, sweat and tears speech drew generously from similar, previous sentiments and is generally misquoted today.

At the low point of conflict with Nazi Germany, Churchill warned embattled Brits in May 1940: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Most people today omit the word toil in quoting Churchill. Perhaps we feel toil is not in the same category of vital, bodily substances. Or, four vitals may upset the customary three-element assertions we customarily expect to support a good joke or story.

Certainly it is different from that of the poet John Donne who wrote in 1611: Mollify it with thy tears, or sweat, or blood.

And that of the poet John Byron in 1823: Year after year they voted cent per cent blood, sweat and tear-wrung millions. Why? For rent.

And Churchills phrase in his 1931 book The Unknown War referring to the armies of the czar before the Russian Revolution wrote: Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain.

Nonetheless, the prime minister liked his enlarged version so much he used it five more times in speeches.

No matter. The public edited the phrase to its simpler form demonstrating the inherent power of public imagination.

Lindsey Williams
http://www.lindseywilliams.org