“You can quote me as saying I was misquoted.”
-Groucho Marx
If you were misquoted, Groucho, you’re a member of a club you don’t want to belong to because it would have you as a member.
Let’s meet some of Groucho’s fellows, the ones who said what they didn’t say in ways they didn’t say it. Yet, we still “remember” the quotes and the cliches in translations and corruptions as outrageous as the Marx Brothers converting the simple voicing of the word bum into a parody of the Spirit of ’76 in The Cocoanuts in a matter of a few screen seconds.
So it’s appropriate that Harpo Marx was the one who said “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” You just couldn’t hear him, so the quote often goes mistakenly to Groucho.
Here are some other things Groucho didn’t say about English, about writing, and about quotations themselves: