reviews-nice-guys

Reference value aside, it’s the bumper harvest of good quotes that make the book so pleasurable.

Keyes’s book, which I would recommend to reference departments, is a fascinating compilation of well-known sayings, phrases and quotations that are inaccurate, misattributed, or both.

Quotation collector and corrector Keyes traces the origins and restores the originals of several hundred familiar sayings from the worlds of sports, politics, entertainment, and literature. … [Source] notes document every case, and the keyword and personal name indexes lend it reference value to set the record straight, a record, as he notes in many …

An interesting compendium.

Keyes points out that the prevalence of misquotes has not abated, notwithstanding the greater ability of technology to help record things accurately. Misquotes occur because we hear what and by whom we want to hear something said.

You can tell what Keyes is up to from the title: He takes quotations we’re all familiar with and shows how and why they are really misquotes, and searches out the origin of phrases that have become almost part of the language without our thinking about it.