Affable (adjective). Capable of being aft, as opposed to forable (q. v.)

A young friend who was in high school as recently as 1940 was telling Dr. Boli a story about his school days. He remembered an English test on which one of the questions was “Who is the greatest living playwright in the English language?”

Our young friend answered “Noel Coward,” but his answer was marked wrong. The correct answer was “George Bernard Shaw.”

There was a long period when it was a known fact that George Bernard Shaw was our greatest living playwright. It was propagated as certain knowledge by English teachers, newspaper critics, and movie newsreels. It was as much an undisputed fact as that Belgrade was the capital of Yugoslavia, or that there were nine planets in the solar system. From one source to another, the knowledge spread as undeniable truth.

But where did this supposed fact come from? How did such a consensus develop? Looking back on those years, Dr. Boli has come to a conclusion that seems obvious in hindsight. Those ripples of certainty moving across the stagnant pond of English literary thought emanated from George Bernard Shaw himself. He himself told us that he was our greatest playwright, our clearest thinker, our wittiest conversationalist, our most important intellectual; and he told it to us so insistently and so often that we came to believe him. After all, he ought to know.

Some of that reputation persists to this day. In his Wikipedia article, we read that “His ironic wit endowed English with the adjective ‘Shavian’, used to characterize observations such as: ‘My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.’” This is, Dr. Boli believes, a fair and typical sample of the ironic wit Shaw employs sparingly in his essays.

Dr. Boli brings up Shaw because he was just reading some of those essays, which he does every few decades or so. He was hoping that, having passed his second century a while back, he would at last be old enough to appreciate the gigantic intellect of G.B.S. But alas, it seems he will need a few more decades. The word that currently comes quickest to his tongue to describe Shaw’s writing is “insufferable.”

It is not that Dr. Boli disagrees with what Shaw is saying. One must expect that one will have some differences of opinion with any writer; Dr. Boli enjoys many writers whose politics he finds simply abominable. No, the insufferable thing is Shaw’s way of insisting that he himself is infallibly right, and that you are either in agreement with him or too stupid even to be worth the trouble of convincing. This is the sort of attitude that wins followers among the weak-minded; Dr. Boli has seen more than one insufferably pedantic high-school history teacher surrounded by a groveling rabble of admirers who spent their spare time reading Ayn Rand.

But what does the rest of the world think of G.B.S. these days? Dr. Boli was surprised to discover that a Google search for those once-famous initials demands quite a bit of scrolling before one comes to anything to do with George Bernard Shaw. He was surprised, but apparently he was small-minded enough to be pleased, to see that at least two unpleasant diseases have crowded Shaw out of the first page of search results.

So Dr. Boli throws the question open to the Internet at large. Do we still think G.B.S. was the towering figure of his age, the greatest intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century? Or do we just shrug and think that he wrote some plays that were amusing in their way?

And if not Shaw, then who was the greatest living playwright in 1940? Dr. Boli saw a splendid production of Blithe Spirit in Pittsburgh last year, and on the strength of it he is inclined to say that the greatest English-speaking playwright alive in 1940 was Noel Coward.

Socialism (noun). In United States political discourse, any government activity that is of no use to the speaker. Socialism is always at the same time wicked and naively idealistic. Government activities from which the speaker does benefit are termed essential services.

Another bit of detective work for the readers.

Searching for the source of one misattributed quotation, we find that there are many misattributed quotations on the Internet. Errors on the Internet! Who would have thought it was possible?

But to say that there are many is to speak with a delicate understatement. The Internet is awash in spurious quotations, which slosh from one collection of quotations to another without ever being questioned—even when the attributions are risibly unlikely. In fact, as a provisional measure, it would probably be safe to add the word “not” in front of the attribution of any circulating Internet quotation you come across—especially if it is set in snazzy type, attached to an inspiring picture, and circulated ad nauseam on Facebook.

The problem predates the Internet, of course. In the churchyard of Old St. Luke’s, a congregation of the French and Indian War era south of Pittsburgh, there is a stone with a curious epitaph:

This world’s a farce,
And all things show it;
I once thought so,
But now I know it.

Local tradition says that it comes from The Beggar’s Opera; but it is easy to see that it does not appear there, at least in the readily accessible versions of Gay’s play. But where did it come from? Google Books finds several references to this particular grave (including some that discuss the fascinating technology used to read the otherwise illegible inscription), but really only one independent use of the whole quotation. It is in the correspondence of Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, in which Mrs. Dunlop quotes a version of the lines as from Gay, but does not cite an individual work. We must conclude, therefore, that (since John Gay is a well-known poet whose works are readily available) Mrs. Dunlop was mistaken, and the lines do not come from Gay at all.

The Internet ought to make it much easier to research the provenance of a quotation; but apparently the Internet also makes us lazier. And that brings us to our assignment for tonight.

Here is a page from “Curated Quotes,” a site where the lists of quotations are supposed to be, in a word, curated:

The 100 Most Famous Quotable Quotes of All Time

The curator describes his methodology, which is sound enough for determining which quotations are most in demand right now. What is very interesting, though, is that he actually made an attempt to weed out spurious quotations, because, as he points out, “Many famous quotes have uncertain origins.” It is very interesting because Dr. Boli believes that a very large number of the quotations on his list are spurious.

Your mission is to go through the list and use your keen literary instinct (an ability for which Dr. Boli’s readers are famous throughout the Internet) to decide which quotations on this list are likely to be spurious. For extra credit, show your work. If you can find the quotation only in lists of famous quotations, and never find a citation of the original work, you can be almost certain that it is spurious.

Dr. Boli will start. This quotation is almost certainly not from Mark Twain:

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

It does not show up anywhere in Google Books except in recent publications, always attributed to Mark Twain without citing a particular work. One book footnotes the source as “Brainyquote.com.”

And another:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

It’s attributed to Albert Einstein on this page. In this case, Wikiquote editors have helpfully done our research for us: “This quote and variants including ‘The definition of insanity…’ or ‘One definition of…’ have been attributed to Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Confucius, and an old Chinese proverb, but this [the book Narcotics Anonymous, 1981] is its first known appearance in print.”

More almost certainly spurious quotations:

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. [Not Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company. [Not Mark Twain.]

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were. [Not Kahlil Gibran.]

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. [Not Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

Many people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they are 75. [Not Benjamin Franklin.]

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. [Not Plato.]

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. [Not Mark Twain.]

Whatever you are, be a good one. [Abraham Lincoln? Really? Dr. Boli wonders whether that attribution might be a little joke tossed in by the curator to see whether anyone is paying attention.]

All right—with very little work, we have disposed of 10% of the list. And here Dr. Boli stops, because he wants to leave his readers something to do. But he makes a prediction: Probably at least a quarter of the quotations on the list will be found to be spurious; and, of the quotations attributed to authors who lived more than a century ago, probably more than half will be spurious.

Once you have found a few spurious quotations, by the way, you could do the author of the list a great favor by communicating your findings to him.

…And Win the Undying Respect of the Internet.

—

This quotation is all over the Internet, attributed to Washington Irving:

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.

Dr. Boli does not believe that Washington Irving wrote those sentences. The actual work is never cited—a sure marker of a misattributed quotation. But in trying to trace the quotation to its real author, Dr. Boli has found only more bafflement.

Here is the longest version of the quotation he can find, as it was printed in The Mother’s Assistant in 1845:

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, of unspeakable love. If there were wanting any argument to prove that man is not mortal, I would look for it in the strong, convulsive emotion of the breast, when the soul has been deeply agitated, when the fountains of feeling are rising, and when tears are gushing forth in crystal streams. O, speak not harshly of the stricken one—weeping in silence! Break not the deep solemnity by rude laughter, or intrusive footsteps. Despise not a woman’s tears—they are what make her an angel. Scoff not if the stern heart of manhood is sometimes melted to tears of sympathy—they are what help to elevate him above the brute. I love to see tears of affection. They are painful tokens, but still most holy. There is pleasure in tears—an awful pleasure! If there were none on earth to shed a tear for me, I should be loth to live; and if no one might weep over my grave, I could never die in peace.

——Dr. Johnson.

You will note the attribution. It seems very unlikely that a Boston publication would attribute a quotation to Dr. Johnson if it was actually by America’s greatest living writer, the one who gave Americans the right to say that their young nation occupied no mean place in the republic of letters.

The Mother’s Assistant is only one of many miscellanies that printed the passage in question in the 1840s—Dr. Boli chose it only because its clear and large type made it easy for Google’s optical character recognition to spare him the trouble of transcribing the whole thing. But in spite of its popularity, the quotation maddeningly seems not to exist anywhere outside collections of quotations. In the 1840s and 1850s it is almost always attributed to Dr. Johnson; but by the 1880s we begin to see it attributed to Washington Irving. In our own century the attribution to Dr. Johnson is completely forgotten; it belongs to Irving. Yet it does not seem to fit the style of either man, and Dr. Boli regards both attributions as spurious. But he has not been able to find it attributed to anyone else.

The quotation does not appear in Google Books at all before 1840. The earliest instance of it Dr. Boli has been able to find is in the Miscellany section of The American Masonic Register, published in Albany, February 6, 1841. Here it is not attributed at all, and it shares space with other miscellaneous paragraphs picked up from here and there:

The Lancaster Gazette offers a new remedy for the tooth-ache, which is, “to boil the head and shake the bones out.”

Is this actually the first appearance of this famous essay on tears? Was it made up by the editor of a Masonic newspaper in Albany to fill a couple of column inches, and then picked up by other editors, with “Dr. Johnson” added to give it weight and authority? Or can one of Dr. Boli’s alert readers find an earlier instance of the same quotation with a positive attribution? That is your assignment for this evening.

The future ain’t what it used to be. Real source: Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico IX.4.

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Real source: Britney Spears.

Tricks and treachery are the Practice of Fools, that have not Wit enough to be honest. Real Source: Ken Lay.

If music be the food of love, play on. Real source: Shep Fields.

It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake. Real source: Cesar Millan.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Real source: John D. Rockefeller.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. Real source: Andrew John Volstead.

The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility. Real source: Tom Cruise.

I really didn’t say everything I said. Real source: Every politician ever accurately quoted.

Historia fundamentum est. Real source: Donald Trump.