Cartoon by Cartoonresource

Published May 20, 2015

This is the longest piece I’ve posted here to date. It’s about the way we quote people —  and misquote them. It’s a lot of words about sometimes minor differences between the reality of what someone says and the popular but inaccurate way it’s later retold. In the end, very little of substance is affected, but it’s always been interesting to me the way what a person says, quite often, goes down in history as something other than the actual, verbatim quote.

Equally engrossing to me is deciding when it matters and when it doesn’t. Most times, it’s nothing more than a minor footnote, of interest only to someone like me who enjoys dissecting and analyzing what people say and how other people retell it. For most people, this entry falls into the “too long, didn’t read” category, and that’s OK. But if you have a similar interest in how quotes become misquotes, you might have noticed these things too. Also, if you make it to the end, you’ll be rewarded with a couple of fun videos that poke fun at misquoted lines, or list dozens and dozens of them. So, there’s that.

Don’t misunderstand me (or misquote me): This is not a dissertation, nor an indictment of the way popular culture hands down such quotes. Also, I don’t have the answers from oral-history experts regarding questions I have about this common dynamic, and I don’t have scientific explanations, particularly regarding misheard or misremembered quotes, but I’ve enjoyed collecting and writing about phrases that have become part of history or pop culture, or both. And, as I consider this post a work in progress, a collection of notes I’ve kept over the years, expect it to be augmented and perhaps annotated from time to time.

During my career writing for newspapers and websites, I spent a lot of time and energy on making sure I quoted people accurately. Truth be told, I probably went overboard (and with the use of quotes in general), opting to err on the side of caution rather than risk misrepresenting what someone said. I know I always hated being misquoted in the rare instances when I was interviewed.

Ask 10 journalists how sacred quotes are, and you’ll get a variety of answers, maybe 10 different ones. It’s a question I struggle with, because after saying everything between quotation marks should be treated as sacred, I’ll concede there’s usually no need for conveying the likes of uh, um, you know, like, and the other types of clutter people (including me) use in conversation. So, yes, I contradict myself, but put me down in the sacred camp if I must choose, because I’ve seen too many times how being sloppy with quotes or playing it too loose with context can rob a piece of its accuracy and its fairness.

(Sidebar: Yes, the “I was quoted out of context” defense is all too often invalid, but there are times when context is everything with a quote, and a good reporter should know that.)

If you ever played telephone as a child, as we did in school, you know how words can be changed as they pass from one person to another, and then another. Sometimes, the effect is harmless enough; other times, it can do irrevocable harm.

I doubt there are many who share my fascination with quotes and misquotes, and I’m certain there are more scholarly approaches than what I have to say here, but I wanted to piece together scraps of thought that have stayed with me through the years of reporting, writing and listening. If you make it all the way to the end of this piece, perhaps you’re the kind of word person whose company I’d enjoy.

Context

As a writer and editor, I use words professionally every day. When I worked as a reporter, I had to ensure the words accurately illustrated what I was trying to convey. Years ago, someone claimed — months after the fact — that I misquoted him in a newspaper story. Almost without exception, I used a tape or digital recorder after that. I don’t know a single reporter who can take notes by hand and get every word. I know several who claim they can and think they can, but they can’t. The best approach is a combination of note-taking and a recorder, and learning how to coordinate using both to fit the situation.

Earlier, I mentioned the considerable disagreement among journalists about how precisely one must quote a source or public figure, and that I find the debate interesting. What was also interesting to me in my reporter days was covering a major sports or news event and reading the coverage the next day. Often, you could read a different version of the same quote in each newspaper that covered the event.

Does it really matter as long as the reader understands the spirit of what was said? There are important quotes worth slaving over to make sure they’re verbatim, and there are others nobody will think twice about after reading a story. What I hated was having a quote in my story chopped up in the editing process in a way that made it not match the actual comments, as readers could hear for themselves if the original quote were on TV or radio. Doing more editing than writing now, I try to remember that when editing a piece for clarity or brevity.

I’ll circle back to this theme later, but I’d like to shift gears and talk about TV and movie quotes (and misquotes). In the end, it matters little what the actual line was as long as people get the gist of the statement, but I continue to find it enjoyable to note how often quotes are misremembered. It’s human nature, and history is filled with examples, and not just in cinema.

Right now, though, let’s go to the movies.

‘Forrest Gump’

We all know Forrest Gump said, “Life is like a box of chocolates,” right? Well, not exactly.

Watching “Forrest Gump” for the second or third time years ago, I listened closely during the scene early in the movie before Forrest begins to share his story. He tells a woman next to him on the bench near a bus stop, “My momma always said life was like a box of chocolates … you never know what you’re gonna get.” (It’s possible he said, “My mom,” but given the Southern drawl Tom Hanks approximates as Forrest Gump, it’s hard to tell for sure. See? Knowing for sure what was said is difficult, right?)

Nearly 100 minutes later, during a flashback, Forrest asks his mother why she is dying.

“It’s my time,” she says. “It’s just my time. Oh, now, don’t you be afraid, sweetheart. Death is just a part of life. It’s something we’re all destined to do. I didn’t know it, but I was destined to be your momma. I did the best I could.”

“You did good, Momma,” Forrest says.

“Well,” she says, “I happen to believe you make your own destiny. You have to do the best with what God gave you.”

Forrest then asks about his destiny.

“You’re gonna have to figure that out for yourself,” his mom says. “Life is a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

The quote goes from “was” to “is,” and from simile to metaphor. It’s easy to understand why the line is quoted the way it usually is.

‘Wall Street’

Gordon Gekko’s famous speech is reportedly derived from one given by Ivan Boesky. You’ll note a minor — but (to me) interesting — point is that the words “greed is good” do not appear consecutively in the sentence. The edit in the public consciousness is understandable, but I do enjoy the full context.

“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind, and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”

A fun side note: Terence Stamp, the wonderful actor who plays Sir Larry Wildman, is General Zod in “Superman II.” I’m sure you knew that, but it had slipped my mind until I happened to see the Man of Steel crush Zod’s hand months ago while I was channel surfing.

‘Cool Hand Luke’

This classic film has so many enjoyable moments, I could spend all day here posting about 10 percent of them and never get around to the next installment of my little project — misquoted movie lines. One of my favorite scenes is when Luke and his bull gang finish tarring the road early, with about two hours of daylight left, after he spurs them on to work fast, fast, fast, and give the bosses speed, speed, speed, just for kicks, and to befuddle them, and because he’s who he is.

“What are we going to do now?”George Kennedy’s character asks when he realizes they’ve run out of road way ahead of schedule.

“Nothin’,” Luke says with a self-satisfied smile.

“Luke, you wild, beautiful thing,” Dragline (Kennedy) chortles. “You crazy handful of nothin’.”

Yeah, well … sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.

The two most memorable quotes in “Cool Hand Luke” are, “Nobody can eat 50 eggs” and, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” The latter is frequently misquoted (but in fairness, Luke himself misquotes it in the movie).

If you find the synopsis of “Cool Hand Luke” on Netflix, you’ll see it begins with this sentence: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” But the captain didn’t say “a” failure; he said failure. What we’ve got here is failure to accurately quote this line.

As I said, Paul Newman’s character misquotes the captain’s line himself, just before he’s shot: “What we got here is a failure to communicate.” Luke, like many in the years since the movie (including the person who wrote the Netflix synopsis), added the word “a” in front of the sentence’s payoff (failure to communicate).

The writers at “Saturday Night Live” got it deliciously right when they came up with one of my favorite sketches in the show’s history. It came in the fifth season, on April 19, 1980. Strother Martin, who played the captain in “Cool Hand Luke,” was guest host of this SNL and played an angry taskmaster of a headmaster of a French language camp for children. Bill Murray and Gilda Radner played young campers, and when Murray’s stubborn character (Luc?) refuses to say “The cat is small” en français (“le chat est petit,”) Strother Martin’s character punishes him in a cruel-hand, Cool Hand Luke sort of way. Then comes the punchline.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate … bilingually.”

Beautiful.

Oh, and if you want to compile a long list of misquotes, get the DVD (remember those?) and listen to the movie with a careful ear and read the subtitles. In many cases, they are, at best, no more than reasonable facsimiles of the lyrical language in this gem of a movie.

And what a cast: Newman, Kennedy, Martin, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton (listed as Dean Stanton), Wayne Rogers, Ralph Waite, Joe Don Baker, J.D. Cannon (the boss on “McCloud”) and so many other wonderful character actors.

‘Seinfeld’

Remember the episode, “The Outing,” in which a student reporter thinks George and Jerry are gay lovers, and writes a feature about Jerry with that as a given? Most people quote the episode’s most widely remembered line as, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

It’s true, that line is delivered that way more than once, but it’s also said a different way: “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”

I’ll always be fascinated by how one of those versions became commonly quoted, and the other did not.

But so much for television and the movies; let’s explore some real-life examples.

Let’s go to the moon

OK, maybe we haven’t left the movies behind just yet, because I’ll start this section with the line in “Apollo 13” uttered by Tom Hanks, who plays astronaut Jim Lovell.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

Dramatic, for sure, and exactly the way most people say the famous quote from that Apollo mission. But at a news conference following the crew’s splashdown on Earth, Lovell explained that it was Jack Swigert, and not Lovell, who first informed NASA, and what he supposedly said was, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

Actually, the transcript shows they both said it.

02 07 55 19 Fred Haise (LMP): Okay, Houston —
02 07 55 20 Jack Swigert (CMP): I believe we’ve had a problem here.
02 07 55 28 Jack Lousma (CAPCOM): This is Houston. Say again, please.
02 07 55 35 Jim Lovell (CDR): Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT.
02 07 55 42 Jack Lousma (CAPCOM): Roger. MAIN B UNDERVOLT.

Source: Apollo 13 transcript starting at 02 07 55 19 on Spacelog

So, Lovell didn’t say “Houston, we have a problem,” but “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

The two lines are almost identical, although there’s a bit of an understated quality to what Lovell told Mission Control (after Swigert’s version) during the flight to the moon (or around it, as it turned out, since the astronauts were unable to fulfill the mission’s objective and land on the moon). Of course, the crew still had a problem, and several, as they would find out during subsequent hours and days.

But it’s interesting to me that the line evolved into the more dramatic version regularly quoted (or misquoted) by people, and used by director Ron Howard in the film. It fit seamlessly into the movie because that’s what most people think Lovell said.

(It wasn’t the only line “Apollo 13” altered for dramatic purposes. Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz said that he never uttered the line attributed to him — “Failure is not an option” — and Howard acknowledged he used artistic license with that line and other scenes in the film.)

Then there’s Neil Armstrong, who did get to land on the moon, and walk on it. As the popular version of history goes, he stepped off the LEM and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

There’s been a lot written about whether he actually said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Acoustic studies of the audio have come to different conclusions, but some say the line was delivered with the indefinite article, but for one reason or another, people were unable to hear the word “a” in front of “man” when he said it. The consensus seems to be that he indeed flubbed the line, and later felt obliged to acknowledge that.

Update: In September 2006, Peter Ford of Control Bionics announced he had analyzed the historic Apollo 11 recordings and claimed to have found a “signature for the missing ‘a,” (supposedly spoken by Armstrong “10 times too quickly to be heard”) but the results have not been validated by other audio analysts and have been criticized as simply interpreting ambiguous data to match a predetermined conclusion. As Rick Houston wrote in Footprints in the Dust, a history of the Apollo program:Note should be made of the debate that has existed almost from the time Armstrong uttered the famous saying. Did he actually say “One small step for a man,” with the indefinite article a somehow lost in transmission? No, he did not, and to imply otherwise is revisionist history. Granted, it is possible, if not probable, that he intended to say “a man.” From the tone and inflection of his voice it seems for all the world that Armstrong caught the mistake immediately. Following “That’s one small step for man,” he added another one, stopped again, then finished the statement with “giant leap for mankind.” There’s nothing lost in transmission, nothing at all, no matter what any super-scientific studies to the contrary might suggest.

Source: snopes.com: Neil Armstrong’s First Words on the Moon

History, inspiration accepted as Gospel

Historical quotes, inspirational quotes and comedy bits sometimes fall victim to this dynamic, where they’re retold as facsimiles of their original phrasing. Such instances are legion, and chances are if a quote sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t entirely accurate.

No doubt you’ve seen some version of this one:

The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine.

— Abraham Lincoln

That one speaks to what I described about historical and inspirational quotes, so there’s no need to dwell on them. You can find many examples of quotes being attributed to the wrong person, or being proven inaccurate, or misrepresented in some way. (And remember, more examples, via video, are coming soon, with a little bit more patience on your part.)

And then there’s the Bible.

If you believe in divine inspiration, then you’re a big step closer to believing that quotes attributed to Jesus are verbatim representations of what he said. This is also easier to believe if you subscribe to the school of thought that the gospels of Luke, Matthew and John were written by the apostles of the same names before they died.

But most theologians maintain that the gospel of Mark was not written by someone who witnessed the life of Jesus, and that the gospel of John was the last to be written. The stories all four contain were shared orally, not in written form, for many years before being written.

Regardless of whether you think the gospels were originally written in Aramaic, or Greek, or Hebrew, it’s clear that much time passed between the stories they tell and the time when they were put into written language.

That’s why, when I hear people argue about whether Jesus said a specific word in a cornerstone quote of Christianity, I think about my experience as a reporter in a much more modern and technologically advanced age than that of the apostles and those who wrote the gospels — and those who chose them for inclusion in the Bible. (Speaking of that, research on the Gospel of Thomas, and why it wasn’t included, gets interesting and weird.)

When, as a reporter, I would hear someone say something quotable for the next day’s paper, I would routinely check the next day to see if every other reporter used that quote — and whether their wording matched mine. Some reporters, for convenience or other reasons,  relied upon the “quote sheet” provided by the public relations department of the people being written about. Some asked another reporter for a quote if they weren’t there to hear it. Some printed whatever they could make of their shorthand or scribbling from 20 minutes earlier, before they sat down to finish their story on deadline. Some, like me, used a recorder.

When I’d see different versions of the same quote in a handful or more papers, I’d often think about people who believed that what they read in their Bible is a literal transcription of what Jesus said more than 2,000 years ago. Then, I’d think about the news I’d reported about the night before, and how quotes from less than 12 hours earlier showed up in different forms in different papers, and I tried to apply the concept of human error to the period when the gospels were written.

I tried to imagine someone writing down a quote that was spoken years or decades earlier, in a different language, and perhaps from a time and place they weren’t present to be able to hear it being said, and then translated into another language, and then another, and then revised, and then revised again, with scholars weighing in on some of the linguistics and context — and then I asked myself how willing someone would be to believe that the quote had been written as spoken, verbatim.

As I said earlier, if they believe in divine inspiration, then no problem. If not, then I’d have to think splitting hairs over every word in the gospels is a case of missing the forest for the trees. If you tend to fall into the “spirit of the law” group rather than the “letter of the law” group, you’re probably not quibbling over every word.

To date, I have never heard anyone ask, “Did Jesus’ mom really say life is like a box of chocolates?” But there’s always tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Monty Python was on to this drift in “Life of Brian.”

And now we’re back to movie quotes, aren’t we?

Let’s wrap it up

Of course we don’t always remember quotes exactly the way we first heard them. We remember them the way we think we heard them, or the way our false memory tells us we heard them. It’s usually no big deal. (Speaking of memory, a therapist told me that when you remember an event from long ago, you’re not remembering the event, but the last time you remembered the event.)

But I think if someone is going to consider a fight to the death over one or more words someone supposedly said, whether it was last night or thousands of years ago, it would be good to take every measure possible to ensure the words are right. And if there’s any doubt, how about no fight to the death over what someone supposedly said centuries ago.

Oh, and don’t forget about context. But who has time for that anymore, right? Nowadays, if someone says (or tweets) that someone else said something controversial, who cares to check to see whether it’s true, whether its context is crucial to its interpretation, and, in the end, whether it really matters in the grand scheme of things.

There is also the added dimension of cultural differences, which can come into play when words are translated, something interpreters face every time they do their job.

And on that note, I leave anyone who’s hung in there this long (and is still awake) with 50 common misquotes, presented by mental floss (oh, and see if you catch the references to “Apollo 13,” “Forrest Gump” and Neil Armstrong, and whether mental floss’ assertions match the evidence I provided above):