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Around my door at the middle school I teach at, I have posted pictures of various historical figures along with inspirational quotations. Included among these is the one you see to the left. I included it both as a humorous touch, and as genuinely good advice.
I was leaning towards believing the quote, and considered bringing it up on Ricochet, as I never saw it discussed in our frequent arguments over the Donald. Fortunately, I saved myself some embarrassment by sticking to my policy of always double-checking quotes I’ve seen online.
May I vent for a moment?
Here goes another word for a well-defined and important concept, swept into the storm drain which is Internet popular culture. “Meme”, as an analogy to “gene”, was proposed in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins for the concept of a self-replicating cultural unit which is transmitted and competes just as genes do in biological evolution. This is a tremendously insightful observation, and many of the puzzles of human behaviour (for example, why is it that every generation or so collectivism/statism breaks out again despite its abject failure wherever it is tried and the demonstrated success of the alternative) make a lot more sense when analysed in terms of memes, or “memetics” (the analogue of genetics).
In the last year or so, “meme” seems to have transmogrified to mean a picture with large text purporting to be a quote or expressing a sentiment of bumper sticker level insight.
Must we lose this important word and concept? If so, with what shall we replace it?
That Lincoln meme is hilarious! Good for you for putting it in the classroom. The Trump meme came across my Facebook feed more than once. There was also a Sarah Palin one that was so obviously fake that I found it on Snopes and outed the FB friend who had posted it. I posted the link confirming its falsehood and said in the comments that she should take it down. She never did. The mindset of her and her lib friends in the comments was “Well, it’s something she COULD have said” or “Well, it SOUNDS like something she’d say.” The facts take a back seat to the narrative. I left Facebook shortly after that. If I allow myself to dwell on it, I get filled with despair at the state of the American intellect.
ps/ The Berenstain Bears were a childhood favorite of mine. I remember the “-stain” spelling because it’s so weird.
I don’t get the Berenstain thing. I’ve always known it was spelled with an “a,” and in my mind I’ve always pronounced it “bear-en-stain.” I assumed that was the correct pronunciation.
But I’ve certainly had the experience of remembering, with absolute certainty, things that I later learn did not happen the way I remember them. I’ve read about neurological research that shows just how unreliable human memory is; apparently, every time we recall something, our brains actually erase and rewrite the memory, often with unintentional distortions. If you keep telling a story from your childhood over and over, the memory will be replaced by the story you tell, even if the story drifts away from the actual truth.
So when someone insists that they remember something that I know can’t be true, I generally take them at their word rather than assuming that they’re liars. They probably *do* remember it. Doesn’t mean it happened.
Oh, and I long ago learned to follow a basic rule: never, never believe any quote you come across on the Internet, at least not without researching it further. Assume they’re all made up, apocryphal, or misattributed, and you’ll rarely be wrong.
Many times I have tried to find the source of a quote and have not succeeded. A lot of these are from rightwise people on the internet.
Honest quote sites on the internet will say that the quote is attributed to an individual and their search can find no proof that the individual actually stated or said what was attributed to them.
As an example, try to track down the origin of the oft-repeated quote:
You can spend a day or more on the quest. As best as I can determine, nobody ever originally said it in that form, but a multitude of people have cited it in various forms, often mis-attributing it to people such as Alexis de Tocqueville. Here is a brief summary of the peregrinations of this quotation.
2 over the last two days (put on FB by the same guy from my church):
Margaret Sanger supposedly saying “colored people are like weeds and need to be exterminated”, with Hillary below, and a not-hard-to-believe quote from her about her admiration for Sanger. My first reaction was to believe the Sanger, but I went looking for it after it seemed excessively blunt. It apparently is not real, but a straw-man version of something she wrote using the metaphor of “human weeds”. I ended up not commenting on it, but yesterday I linked to Snopes on the following:
Hillary supposedly saying “I will get the NRA shut down for good if I become president. If we can ban handguns we will do it.” This even attributed this to an interview with the Des Moines Register, August 8, 2015. I think Hillary is too smart to go to Iowa and say that. I happen to be on an old Newspaper site, so I went on and typed “hillary” and that exact date and paper. It didn’t come up.
Aye, the truth can be so unaccommodating sometimes. As John Adams once said (and he really did say this one):
There is a posting I see every summer on Facebook from many well-meaning people that purports to tell the “true story” of the Star Spangled Banner. But it is totally wrong!! It’s a video, with a dramatic narration done by a man with a folksy voice. But the story he tells is completely WRONG!! I keep telling my friends, nicely as I can, that it is wrong. I’ve even looked up the original poster and commented to him that the story is not historically accurate at all. Sigh. Every year, I see that dopey video come up again, and again. [No, it didn’t happen during the Revolutionary War. No, there weren’t a large group of prisoners on a British ship being held in horrid conditions.] And one obnoxious aspect of it is that the real story of how the National Anthem was written is very inspiring, and really terrific. There’s no need to embellish or change it!
Indeed, this is a verified quotation. I have often signed my E-mail with my own modified version:
Perhaps in the era of Brawndo, it will be attributed to John Adams.
Yes. Yes, it does.
So do I. Like you, I could have sworn it was spelled with an E instead of an A. That A just looks wrong.
LOL! Love it! Can’t decide which one I like better.
@RightAngles
I just finished American/British writer Bill Bryson’s latest book, The Road to Little Dribbling. While passably good, and laugh-out-loud funny in spots, he simply couldn’t resist the usual liberal snark. In one passage he mentioned the canard—later admitted by its perpetrator to be a hoax—that Sarah Palin had called Africa a country. He really needs better editing.
I have a good memory. I remember things from the past very well. I often remember them wrong, but I remember them well.
John, that’s beautiful. I need that on a t-shirt or bumper sticker ASAP.
Regarding the words attributed to George Washington, see this article, which finds a reference only as old as 1902. A technologically updated version appears in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In Chapter 22, Professor “Prof” de la Paz states: “Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a powerful master.”
Whoever said it first was a perceptive individual indeed.
I think there’s a version of that line in D’Souza’s Hillary’s America. I thought when I heard it that there were doubts about its accuracy.
Attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
As for the Trump quote 1998 just seems too early for someone to use the “Republican love everything they see on Fox News” trope. Looking it up now I see it first aired Oct 7, 1996, less than 2 years before Trump would have said that.
I met a lovely Lady and Our relationship developed so fast that We were in front of the Justice of the Peace in less than a year. Well, it fell through because I had to move on very short notice and She couldn’t come with Me.
If You listen to Her tell the story You’d think I was stalking Her, She took Me to court and I got 20 months in county.
I mean… really… Who You gonna believe….?
That has such serious implications for eyewitness testimony in court cases, when lives and fortunes are on the line and can be lost because of distorted (i.e., false) memories.
I agree that it would be a shame if the original meaning should be lost. But I think that the people who talk about internet memes are not the same crew that are going to be talking about memetics. Maybe the word can serve both purposes without too much confusion.
Yes, @mollysmom! And there are far too many people who believe Sarah Palin (and not Tina Fey) actually said, “I can see Russia from my house!”
My children tell me that, but what do they know. So what if the snow was an inch deeper every year, that it was a degree colder every year, the hill (both ways) was a foot higher every year. I WAS STILL IN MY BARE FEET! :)
There is also a lot of common remembrances of lines in movies that were never really said. As an example, Humphrey Bogart never said “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca.
Can I quote you? :)
This can be completely innocent. I’ve misremembered movie and TV quotes many times. Until I watch the movie again and correct myself, I’ll swear the quote was as I remembered; I’m thinking now of a quote from Hombre and another from season 5 of The X-Files. Also, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.
Tell them that the reason it’s not so cold now is global warming. Then they might believe you.
This. I’m remembering events from parallel universes all the time. I remember a DJ referring — in the 70’s — to the late Joe Cocker. (I suppose he could’ve been kidding….)
There are other examples I can’t now remember, but I know it’s happened more than once.
Re the spelling: I’ve read that the brain/mind shoves percepts into known categories; if something comes along you’ve never seen before, the first thing your mind will do is interpret it with the pattern it most closely resembles. “Stain” is NOT a common ending of anyone’s last name, so you saw, “stein”, and never thought anything more about it.