US: A new book of quotations aims to sort out what they really said from what they would like to have said, writes Arthur Spiegelman in Los Angeles
The great showman PT Barnum never said "There's a sucker born every minute", although he wished he had. And US civil war admiral David Farragut probably never said "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead" - words that have inspired generations of fighting men.
Sherlock Holmes did not say "Elementary, my dear Watson." The nearest the great detective got to it was the single use of the word "elementary" in The Crooked Man.
And that old Star Trek favourite "Beam me up Scotty" has been dematerialised too - it was simply never uttered.
A new, meticulously researched book of quotations attempts to set the record straight on those beloved phrases that have crept into everyday use as signs of wisdom and wit, including Sigmund Freud's sage advice that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
(He didn't quite say that, although his biographer thinks he would have approved of the idea.)
The Yale Book of Quotations has a simple thesis: famous quotes are often misquoted and misattributed. Sometimes they were never said at all but are simply little fictions that have made their way into public consciousness.
Take, for example "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead", a rallying cry supposedly uttered by Admiral Farragut during the American Civil War battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864.
According to Fred R Shapiro, a Yale librarian and editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, it was a comment either never said or at least never heard on the day of battle. The first appearance of a partial version of the phrase came in a book published in 1878.
It can get "curiouser and curiouser", to quote something Lewis Carroll actually did write.
Gen William T Sherman did not quite say "War is hell", but the words were uttered by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Sherman's version was a little bit longer: "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys it is all hell." Close, but no cigar, as Groucho Marx might have said on his quiz show when someone failed to guess the colour of an orange correctly.
Showman Barnum admitted during his lifetime that he never said "There's a sucker born every minute", although he thought he might have said "The people like to be humbugged", a less than ringing phrase.
According to research by Shapiro, the "sucker" phrase was probably uttered by a notorious conman named "Paper Collar Joe" and attributed to Barnum by a rival showman who wanted to make him look bad.
To find out who said what and when they did it, Shapiro spent six years poring over hundreds and hundreds of databases, using advanced Internet searches as well as the more old-fashioned methods of going through microfilms, dusty bookshelves and reading the 1,000 or so other quotation books that are out there to find out the truth.
For example, he went through all of Mae West's pre-1967 films to find out when she delivered one of her great sexual double entendres - "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"
He says the line was not in any of her films, including the one her fans swear it was in, She Done Him Wrong.
Instead, according to Shapiro, West used it to greet a policeman assigned to escort her. As she once said of herself: "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."
The result, after six years of research, is a 1,067-page quotations book with footnotes that are as fascinating as the quotes themselves.
Shapiro said he also had another goal: to represent popular culture in a quotations book, including advertising jingles and lines from popular songs and movies.
As a result, he is able to get in print a couple of famous quotes from Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington DC: "Outside of the killing [Washington DC] has one of the lowest crime rates in the country" and "Bitch set me up", a comment he made when police arrested him for smoking crack cocaine.
Not quite the lofty Shakespeare-style of previous quotations books. But the Bard is in the Yale book as well, with 455 citations, the most of any author.