Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations

383 Pages·2017·1.76 MB·English

by  Garson O’Toole

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Text copyright © 2017 by Garson O’Toole All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Little A, New York www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or
its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503933415 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 1503933415 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503933408 (paperback) ISBN-10: 1503933407 (paperback)
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli First edition
In memory of my brother, Stephen
CONTENTS
START READING
INTRODUCTION THE DETECTIVE, THE DATABASE, AND THE
MECHANISMS OF ERROR
I GROUP ERROR
SYNTHESIS VENTRILOQUY PROVERBIAL WISDOM
SYNTHESIS
VENTRILOQUY
PROVERBIAL WISDOM
II READER ERROR
TEXTUAL PROXIMITY REAL-WORLD PROXIMITY SIMILAR NAMES
TEXTUAL PROXIMITY
REAL-WORLD PROXIMITY
SIMILAR NAMES
III AUTHOR ERROR
CONCOCTIONS * HISTORICAL FICTION
CONCOCTIONS
HISTORICAL FICTION
IV FINDERS KEEPERS
CAPTURE * HOST
CAPTURE
HOST
INDEX (BY NAME)
INDEX (BY QUOTATION)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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INTRODUCTION
THE DETECTIVE, THE DATABASE, AND
THE MECHANISMS OF ERROR
How did I begin investigating the dubious origins of familiar quotations? I will
tell you: In the 1990s I developed an enthusiasm for electronic books. I felt they
had enormous potential to advance access to the world’s knowledge cheaply and
efficiently. Massive digital libraries, every book in the public domain, shared
worldwide at low cost on the Internet—the thought excited in me a desire to
learn more about the potential applications of such technology.
Meanwhile, a pioneer in electronic publishing named Brad Templeton had
assembled a groundbreaking CD-ROM, Hugo and Nebula Anthology 1993, a
digital collection of five novels and numerous short stories, at the time the first
e-book of contemporary writing. The works were all nominees for the Hugo and
Nebula Awards, the top literary prizes for science fiction. The CD-ROM cost
about as much as a hardcover book these days, $29.95. The forward-thinking
fans of science fiction were ideal customers for this innovative collection, and as
one of them, I couldn’t resist. I purchased the CD-ROM as the harbinger of the
future. But Templeton’s project was many years too early and, sadly, never
caught on.
In the early 2000s I read and commented on articles at a website devoted to
e-reading called TeleRead. At the prompting of the founder, David Rothman, I
began to contribute articles. Rothman envisioned a “well-stocked national digital
library.” He had been propounding the idea for over a decade in op-ed pieces
published in periodicals such as Computerworld, and I was glad to find someone
who shared the same viewpoint about the magnificent potential of electronic
reading.
It would soon turn out that a central part of this idea was already being
pursued by a former graduate student of Stanford University. Larry Page, the
cocreator of Google, shared this dream of constructing a searchable digital
library, one that might contain all the books of the world. In time he found
himself in a position to do something about it. Google engineers developed
efficient machines using multiple cameras and sensors to create scans of page
after page of one volume after another, and in 2002 the machines were put to
work. Beginning at his undergraduate alma mater at the University of Michigan,
Page would pursue the stacks of the major research libraries in the United States
and the United Kingdom. The Google Books database now contains more than
thirty million searchable books.
The fantasy became reality very quickly. Despite complex questions of
copyright that threatened, for a time, to shut the database down, the futurist
library had been built. I wondered even then how one could prove to others the
power and value of such an expansive library. The whole of linguistic history at
one’s fingertips: What is one to do? Searching for words, phrases, and
statements would reveal a trove of connections and citations. But what could one
learn?
To test the utility of the search procedure, I decided to explore the history
of a hex that only sounds like a blessing:
May you live in interesting times.
The saying fit the project. Robert F. Kennedy had once labeled the
statement a “Chinese curse” when he employed it during a commencement
speech given at the University of Capetown, South Africa, in 1966. Indeed,
others have called it “ancient.” (More recently, Hillary Clinton included the
saying in her memoir Living History.)
When I sought in 2007 to answer the question of where the saying had
come from, I discovered that many people had already explored its history.
Wikipedia volunteers had created an entry on the topic with an initial citation in
1950, and this entry functioned as my benchmark. If I could determine that the
statement had appeared before 1950, then I would write an article for TeleRead
illustrating the effectiveness and potency of performing research with Google
Books.
It only took a few strokes of the keyboard for me to immediately locate
within the Google Books database a 1930 citation for a short story in a magazine
called Astounding Science Fiction. Had it really taken only my single search to
best Wikipedia? No. This was my rocky introduction to the complexity and
difficulty of searching within large textual databases like Google Books. While
cross-checking the date of the issue in question, I determined that the story I had
found, “U-Turn” by Duncan H. Munro, had in fact been published in 1950. I was
befuddled. Why was Google Books supplying incorrect dates? The tight