Everyone wants to go down in history for coming out with a phrase so deeply profound, witty and illuminating that it echoes down the ages. For most of us, our bon motes, at best, might raise a smile at a party, but for some they are capable of raising armies.
However, many of histories best loved one liners have had a the benefit of bit of touching up over the years. Some have had a lot of touching up and some of them are just plain made up. Here’s a run down of some of the best things people never said.
“Elementary, My Dear Watson…”
You might think it strange to kick off this list with Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character form a series of novels, but it look at it this way; all he ever said is written down clearly in an easy to find source.
Surely, this means is no way they could be misquoted in the first place, let alone misquoted so often that he’s become most famous for something that he never actually said!?
Obviously not… At no point in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels does this famous sequence of words appear. Yet, thanks to hundreds of made for TV movies the memorable formulation has gone down as the master detective’s catchphrase. It seems TV is more powerful than the written word, but I guess that’s elementary…
“Let Them Eat Cake”
Thanks to this wonderfully heartless repost to the news that the peasants of her kingdom had no bread to eat, Marie Antoinette has gone down in the book of ages as a pretty shoddy monarch.
Whilst she may not have been a woman of the people, she never went quite this far. To be honest, she probably wasn’t quite so good with words.
The quote actually comes from a memoir by the French writer Rousseau (who definitely was good with words) and he attributes it to a fictional princess. The line was most likely pinned on the queen by anti-royalists looking to smear her name. A job well done, then…
“Money is the Root of All Evil”
This would provide a convenient explanation of why we aren’t living in paradise, seeing as all forms of society that acknowledge the concept of property, roughly 99.9% of them, need money to function effectively.
Luckily for us, there is hope. The bible actually says that ‘love of money” is the root of all evil. Now you might argue that the misquoters have only omitted one little word, but if the Beatles can be trusted, and I think they can, it’s the word that they’ve skipped.
Perhaps skim reading is in fact the root of all evil…
“Alas, Poor Yorick! I Knew Him Well”
Alas poor fool! That’s not the line. Yes, one of the most famous phrases that the great genius Shakespeare gifted to the world is actually a misquote. He, or rather his character Hamlet, doesn’t say those immortal worlds. He says;
“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio…”
”
Which is less catchy I grant you, but to be fair Hamlet said a lot of stuff. It wasn’t all going to be gold now, was it?
“I am a Jelly Doughnut”
When John F. Kennedy was visiting West Berlin in 1963 he issued the famous words “Ich bin ein Berliner”, meaning “I am a citizen Berlin”, as a statement of America’s intent to keep the region democratic in the face of the Soviet’s construction of the Berlin wall.
Afterwards, some claimed that what Kennedy should have said was “Ich bin Beliner” and that by adding the indefinite article “ein” he had inadvertently implied he was a non-human Berliner.
As the word “Berliner” is slang in some parts of Germany for a jelly doughnut, it became widely believed that Kennedy had mistakenly claimed to be a pastry!
However, as he was speaking figuratively (he wasn’t actually from Berlin. That might have hampered his election campaign!) the “ein” was in fact needed. Rest assured, the USA has never been governed by a baked good, though, looking at some recent Presidents, we might have been better of if it had…
Author Bio: Janet Chapel works in recruitment and is used to seeing muddle their words on their resumes and the in interviews. She helps people to conduct their job search through her site jobsearchstop.com