11

Other People’s Words

True wit is nature to advantage dress’d.
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.

—Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, II

 

When we encounter exemplary expression—words producing the very effect we long to achieve—we can do two things: (1) emulate it by fashioning our own words after the model, or (2) quote it; that is, borrow someone’s else’s words to represent our thoughts. Everyone borrows words; some do so more nimbly than others. Expression would be insufferably bleak without the charms and treasures of utterances past. Borrowed words connect us to one another, across periods, across cultures. They affirm the universality of human thought and emotions. And for “one brief shining moment” (Camelot) at a time, they make us look good.

“Freedom is like a blanket which, pulled up to the chin, uncovers the feet,” I’ve often said to nods of approval. It so happens that John Updike said these words previously in his novel The Coup, but they passed my simple tests of quotability—I wish I’d said them, and I want to say them. So into the notebook they went and out they come at appropriate times, usually with credit to Mr. Updike.

Not every well-turned phrase can be copied or marked, but those that resonate, those relating to the things I like to talk about, and those not likely to appear in popular quotation books I try to add to my repertoire of expressiveness. The more arcane or private the source, the better; the words will be fresh to my audience. A friend given to quirky outbursts once announced, “I enjoy life through the medium of dread.” It made the notebook.

What we think of as familiar or “best-loved” quotes may lack freshness but usually bear repeated hearings. They are best-loved for good reasons, among them:

Sound and rhythm: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…” (Lewis Carroll)

Concise wisdom (economy): “ …to thine own self be true…” (William Shakespeare)

Comfort: “After all, tomorrow is another day.” (Margaret Mitchell)

Precision: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares…” (Isaiah 1:18)

Humanity: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” (Emma Lazarus)

Wit: “I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll make an exception.” (Groucho Marx)

Application to one’s purpose: “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” (Song of Solomon 2:10)

Such standbys are durable over the long term but cloying when they come thick and fast. As “brevity is the soul of wit” (Shakespeare), sparsity is the rule of borrowed expressiveness. Expression can drown itself in borrowings. Audiences crave sincerity and spontaneity, both of which are eroded by torrential quotation. Perhaps you know one of those walking compendia of pithy sayings. You fear to mention a word within their hearing. “Marriage, did you say? ‘The only adventure open to the cowardly.’ Voltaire. ‘A triumph of habit over hate.’ Oscar Levant. ‘It doesn’t go with everything else in the house.’ Jean Kerr.” The only greater challenge to listener endurance is a speaker who has passed the night with a toastmaster’s quote book:

You’ve kindly asked me to review the year on Wall Street. Well, “ask, and it shall be given,” but what can I tell you? “You pays your money and you takes your choice.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Were there geniuses? “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Were there losers? Hah—“Look how the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle!” “Beware of false prophets” proved good advice. But “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet, folks.” …

True enough, you ain’t heard nothin’. Quotations cannot be used as showy distractions from the emptiness of new messages. A few apt selections break the humdrum of the here-and-now. Too many, and the borrowings become white noise themselves.

In spite of these liabilities, the temptation to seize another’s words is overpowering, for rarely has average expression been so impoverished, and never has our inventory of quotations been larger or more accessible. Whatever my thought, an apt quote (or fifty) is at hand.

The world’s stock of “noble” words was considerable even before printing, but not so great as to discourage newly quotable expression. “Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds,” said Plato, quoting Socrates. That hardly slammed the door on aphorisms about fame. Even after the unsurpassable grace of the Bible, even after the legacies of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle, to mention just a few much-quoted Brits—there was room for yet more pithy observations on most topics—including fame:

Fame is a food that dead men eat—
I have no stomach for such meat.

—Austin Dobson

With modern communications and electronic archiving, however, the body of recorded expression grows exponentially, layering the planet with the already-said about everything. Most of this expression is retrievable. “Quotable” remarks once gathered as diamonds from select sources are now strip-mined from the entire terrain of expression to feed journalism, scholarship, and the reference industry. For preservation and study this is useful. For choosing one’s words it can be overwhelming.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edition, version 4.0 (2009, CD-ROM) contains some 2.5 million quotations, and not all of them brief snippets to illustrate usage history. More than 33,000 of the OED’s quotations are from Shakespeare alone and about 25,000 are from the Bible. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations offers some 20,000 entries. The Yale Book of Quotations puts roughly 12,000 on the table; the 2002 Familiar Quotations (“Bartlett’s,” which first appeared in 1855) runs to almost 1,472 pages of judiciously selected quotations. These sources overlap somewhat, but there are hundreds of English-language collections of quotations, proverbs, epigrams, meditations, slogans, mottoes, maxims, one-liners, and so on, not to mention the equivalents in other major languages.

Practically every cogent sound bite from the recent or distant past is vacuumed into huge general collections or gathered in specialized collections under every imaginable topic or popular category: best quotes, unkind quotes, love quotes, war quotes, women’s quotes, black quotes, Yiddish quotes, gay quotes, film and television quotes. Or fighting words, inspirational words, last words, and so on. All this ready-made expression—as eager to jump into my prose as dust onto my computer screen! Whatever I mean to say, someone always seems to have said it more eloquently, more pointedly, more vigorously. Even Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain one of the most quoted of all Americans, envied the virgin territory of the earliest wordsmith, Adam: “When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.”

WITH ABUNDANCE, RISKS

Here is the most intimidating development of all: Now, in an electronic instant, I can retrieve quotations applying to any imaginable topic. Reference publishers are issuing or licensing massive collections of quotes in digital packages. These collections put the cream of the world’s concise expression on databases for purchase or available online through libraries. Log in, and you are master of a court of wits numbering in the thousands. “I wish to speak of ‘roses’ and ‘love’!” you decree, and—click—scores of offerings parade before your eyes to suit every desired nuance.

In view of such tempting abundance, Joseph Roux’s admonition is truer than ever: “A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.” Using quotes in public expression calls for the same discrimination and agonizing over effect that goes into choosing one’s own words. Just sorting through the universe of possibilities is challenge enough, but once you present someone else’s expression as part of yours, you are judged by it. Was the quotation to the point? Did it respect or at least acknowledge the audience’s intelligence and tastes? Was it fresh or presented in a fresh context? Was it quoted accurately? To most modern audiences, a quote such as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” may miss on all four counts. (“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”—William Congreve, The Mourning Bride.)

You might be further judged on how you have misunderstood a quote or twisted it to your own purposes. Many thousands of popular phrases have strayed from the source quotation, for better or worse. “He who hesitates is lost” is said to be a distortion (probably for the better) of Joseph Addison’s “The woman that deliberates is lost” (Cato). Sometimes a shortening known as a “tag” is a practical variant. “There’s a method to his madness” derives from “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” (Hamlet).

If time allows, all quotations should be checked, but most audiences are forgiving (or unaware) of minor misquotation, especially in speech. Now and then I would hear convention speakers say “growed like Topsy” in this sense: “Well, interest rates plunged, and stocks just growed like Topsy!” Ignorant of the source, I finally checked to see who this ballooning Topsy might be. The quote is from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

[Aunt Ophelia] “Do you know who made you?”
[Topsy, the slave girl] “Nobody, as I knows on,” said the child
with a short laugh. “I ’spect I grow’d.”

A truer use: “We don’t know who placed that order to buy; we ’spect that, like Topsy, it just grow’d.”

In public speaking or writing, repeating the words of others is an art achieved with some anxiety. The joys of private quotation are another matter. Writing down stimulating quotes, whether from published collections or your own readings, will help invigorate your way of speaking even if you don’t use the quotations publicly. What quicker way to get the tongue around new and refreshing patterns? What better exercise for muscling thoughts into words?

ON WRITING: FROM MY PRIVATE COLLECTION

My own plump notebook of quotations—scrawled from things I’ve read or heard over the years—includes some choice words related to writing. They have served me well if only to temper whichever (typical) writer’s mood swing I happen to be experiencing. When all seems futile, for example, I revisit these quoted words:

“The world spins, we stumble on. It is enough.”

—Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, 2009

 

“The book gives you the gift as you write it.”

—E. L. Doctorow, lecture, Chicago, 1985

 

“Writing a novel is like walking through a dark room with a lantern which illuminates the things that were always there.”

—Virginia Woolf,

quoted by Margaret Atwood in interview, Oct. 2000 “We … can only see as far as we can say.”

—Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Tricycle, summer 2011.

Or, when small successes balloon my self-importance, I can page to these deflating words on the writer and writers in general:

“He [Bech, the minor novelist] was not a superb human being. He was a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times.”

—John Updike, Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel, 1998.

 

“Writers, some of us at least, can be like cockroaches, running away when the lights come on.”

—Jean Thompson, The Writer, February 2002

 

“[H]e was free to wonder why so many writers’ women killed themselves, or went insane. And he concluded: because writers are nightmares. Writers are nightmares from which you cannot awake.”

—Martin Amis, The Information, 1996

We expand our language capacity with quotes, including those from periods whose vocabulary and syntax seem quaint. Chaucer’s “It is nought good a sleyping hound to wake” offers more to chew on than the prosaic “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Because we find charm and refreshment in archaic- and poetic-sounding word order, we often favor antiqued translations. We prefer “one swallow does not a summer make” to “…does not make a summer,” although the Greek and Spanish sources could be translated either way.

The best quotations offer more than a pretty string of words. They encapsulate general wisdom and illuminate our thinking. Longer quotes—those more than a few sentences—may be what Winston Churchill had in mind when he said, “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” It doesn’t hurt educated folks, either.

LET SLEYPING CATCHPHRASES LIE

What does hurt is repeating other people’s pat (or pet) phrases only to feel them dropping dead from your lips. Maybe they had more pop when you heard them, freshly plucked from a commercial or comedy sketch. Maybe certain other people had a way of putting them over. In casual use you might squeeze one more response from “reality check,” “game plan” or “out of control.” But by the time you get them into a speech or article, they have all the force of a proverb painted on shellacked wood: Vee grow too soon oldt und too late schmart, ya?

Car dealers speak of “previously owned” autos these days instead of “used” cars. “Previously owned” suggests premium quality well preserved. “Used” connotes beat up, on its last legs. Other people’s words can be viewed in such terms. Quotes such as Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” or Andy Warhol’s “In the future everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” are rent-a-wrecks. They have 200,000 miles on them and have blown their rods. Meanwhile, previously owned words such as these of Roman lexicographer Festus keep purring away:

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial.… He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

RULES OF ATTRIBUTION AND GENERAL USE

We quote not only to reinforce and embellish our messages, but to deviate from predictable expression. Deviousness taxes our inventiveness to the limit, so we get help: Here and there we borrow deviant expression from others. In doing so we still serve our audiences by stimulating them, assuming they have not been overexposed to the borrowing. Describing some classically awful film, for example, I might use the oxymoron “treasurably bad,” which I spotted in a New York Times review by John Rockwell. But what about attribution? Do I credit Rockwell, respecting the creativity he put into that phrase?

In formal quotation of any length, we credit the source. In casual use of others’ expression, we give credit if we know the source and if our audience is likely to care. Writing for publication or speaking publicly, I would certainly give Rockwell his due, even for two words; I would do the same in an academic paper. Yakking with friends, I might slip the phrase in and skip any pedantic-sounding attribution. If they remark on it, I will confess the borrowing.

We all repeat those phrases that seem to be of general ownership, often without knowing the source. But of course we stop short of two sins. Briefly described they are:

Copyright infringement: Illegal use of published or unpublished writing (words in tangible form) that is protected under copyright. From the time of its creation, most original writing is now protected for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. (Earlier legislation allowed for different terms, so that material published before 1923 and many pre-1964 publications are in the public domain, along with U.S. government publications.)

Copyright law, however, allows for limited “fair use” of protected material for such purposes as criticism, commentary, and news reporting. Key factors in judging fair use are: How commercial is the use? How much of the work’s “essence” is borrowed? What proportion of the full work is used? How does the borrowing affect the market for the original? Practice in the publishing industry indicates that borrowing up to three hundred words of an average book-length (prose) work is fair use for criticism, commentary, or news, provided those words are not of some extraordinary value in the original (for example, the ending of a mystery thriller). But beware unauthorized use of even a single line of protected poetry or song, and limit borrowings from short prose works to some fifty words or five percent, whichever is less. Like all borrowed material, fair-use items should be credited. Beyond fair use, the copyright owner’s permission is required, and permission often comes with a fee.

Plagiarism: Presenting as your own a cluster of words you know to be someone else’s. In writing that is not to be published, such as a course paper, plagiarism is an ethical problem undone by citations that credit the source. In works for publication or public performance, plagiarizing copyrighted material is both unethical and illegal, with serious penalties. Representing even uncopyrighted material as your own work is just plain pathetic. So much for the legal/ethical rules. To help cap our general discussion, here are seven rules of thumb (six of them borrowed) on borrowing other people’s words:

1. If you’ve heard it twice in the last year, don’t use it. That should take care of “May the wind always be at your back” and sayings like it.

(Four rules from librarian and educator Charles Curran:¹)

2. Repeat a platitude, expect an attitude.

3. Declare a dictum, reside in hickdom.

4. Mouth a cliché, you’re passé.

5. Proverb, schmahverb.

6. “Everything has already been said but, since no one pays attention, it has to be repeated each morning.” (attributed to Marcel Proust by Camilo José Cela)

7. “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)