Hemingway Didn't Say That
The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations
The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations
"Extensive and brilliant investigations...a tour de force of detective work...Mr. O'Toole is a beacon of accuracy who should inspire all readers who prefer their facts real rather than phony." --Wall Street Journal Everywhere you look, you'll find viral quotable wisdom attributed to icons ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, from Cicero to Woody Allen. But more often than not, these attributions are false. Garson O'Toole--the Internet's foremost investigator into the dubious origins of our most repeated quotations, aphorisms, and everyday sayings--collects his efforts into a first-ever encyclopedia of corrective popular history. Containing an enormous amount of original research, this delightful compendium presents information previously unavailable to readers, writers, and scholars. It also serves as the first careful examination of what causes misquotations and how they spread across the globe. Using the massive expansion in online databases as well as old-fashioned gumshoe archival digging, O'Toole provides a fascinating study of our modern abilities to find and correct misinformation. As Carl Sagan did not say, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
Reviews with the most likes.
I really appreciated the author's attention to detail and to making sure false attributions were revealed. There is a problem with the surfeit of words and text inundating us these days, and I applaud the author's attempt to clarify the origins of numerous well-known sayings. However, I soon found myself tired of wading through the often convoluted histories of pithy sayings, and began skimming down through the essays until I reached the “in conclusion” paragraph. I guess that is “typical” for modern readers who are only mildly curious in a subject. While it is comforting to know that at least some measure of scholarly research has been done on a subject, unless one is keenly interested in the subject, a quick overview is sufficient. This book was, still, a fun read, and had some surprises, and I would recommend it even to those merely mildly interested in such things. To paraphrase one of the the (funny) examples in this book: “This book will appeal to those who like this kind of book.”
