The limitations of quotations
Or, Booksmart vs. smart books
Booksmart is a terrific movie, filled with zippy dialogue, sharp performances, inventive profanity, and a banging soundtrack. Go see it! But before you do, two spoiler-free observations:
With “Getting Straight A’s. Giving Zero F’s”, Booksmart has the tagline of the year so far. It improves upon the previous contender, space opera The Expanse, which went with “Zero G’s. Zero F’s” way back in February.
In his supporting role as the frustrated Principal Brown, Jason Sudeikis riffs on the many books his character is planning to write:
“There’s nothing more exciting or daunting than the blank page. Oh, that’s good. Maybe I’ll do a book of quotes. [Starts recording on his phone] ‘There’s nothing more exciting or daunting than the blank page.’”
(You can hear the line sampled in Dan The Automator’s zingy track Full Star here.)
Isn’t a book of quotes supposed to be a book of other people’s quotes? Unless you’re La Rochefoucauld, it’s a lot of daunting/exciting blank pages to fill. And sadly, the book of quotes format has been rendered obsolete by Wikiquote. In my research for Elements of Wit and beyond, I’ve assembled a few shelves worth of the genre — and it seems Principal Brown is onto something. These collections have a notable tendency to slip their editor’s rocks in among the Wildean jewels. For instance, Leo Rosten’s Carnival of Wit features these three japes under the subject of Happiness:
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.” — George Orwell
“Anyone who is happy all the time is nuts.” — Leo Rosten
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” — Oscar Wilde.
Nobody in here but us wits! Who was Rosten? According to his bio, he wrote 34 books, 10 movies, and is “the man who knows more about the joy of laughter than anyone else in the wacky world today”— today being 1966.
Similarly, Leonard Lewis Levinson, the editor of Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, bills himself as “the creator of The Great Gildersleeve and Fibber McGee’s closet” and his “numerous books embrace a dizzying range of topics, from Wall Street to cooking to Casanova, and include the best-selling The Left-Handed Dictionary and Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary.” In his collection, he inserts biologically inaccurate lines like:
“A mushroom is wood in its most delectable form.” — LLL
Amidst the likes of:
“Love is like mushrooms. One doesn’t know if they belong to the good or bad sort until it is too late.” — Tristan Bernard
But enough mushroom talk; you’ve got a movie to see. The one unambiguous virtue of these books of quotations is that they were at least lightly edited. The online quotation business is full of fakes, errors, hoaxes, and misattributions. (Churchill probably never said “Farts are just the ghosts of things we ate,” though it’s impossible to know exactly how dark things got in the darkest hour.)
The best exception is Garson O’Toole’s Quote Investigator, a sort of Snopes for the spoken word. If you’ve ever wondered whether it was John Quincy Adams or Dolly Parton who said that clever thing, O’Toole’s got the answer. As the sixth president of the United States didn’t muse, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap.
Quick quips; lightning
“I say hardly any of those clever things that are attributed to me. I wouldn’t have time to earn a living if I said all those things.” — Dorothy Parker
Fittingly, this line from the 20th century’s most quoted woman (1893-1967) was verified by Quote Investigator.
“A lot of people go to Shakespeare to recognize the quotations.” — James Aswell
This quotation about quotations is often attributed to the recognizable Orson Welles (1915-1985); as Quote Investigator proves here, it actually came from Aswell, an otherwise forgotten 1930s New York newspaper columnist.
“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.” — Saki
Or to paraphrase the author also known as H.H. Munro (1870-1916): If you can’t improve the quality of what you’re saying, at least reduce the quantity.
Thanks for reading the fourth issue of Get Wit Quick, the weekly newsletter about pulling the levers of clever. Each week, I aim to drop so many turns of phrase in your inbox that you end up pleasantly dizzy but never nauseated. How’s my driving? LMK at ben@getwitquick.com.