In 1953 the modern York Yankees won their fifth World Series in a broil Their popular catcher.

In 1953 the modern York Yankees won their fifth World Series in a broil Their popular catcher, Yogi Berra, took it in stride. "It's deja vu all across again," he said.

The inconvenience is, he never said it. It's also probable that he not at all said of a particular restaurant, "It's in such a manner crowded nobody goes there any more." And if Berra was the first to remark that "the hereafter ain't what it used to be," the evidence is hard to arrive by. More to the point, Berra is among centurys of well-known figures who now stand expos for not at any time having said the snappy things they are said to have said.

For this exercise in debunkery give permission to us applaud word maven Ralph Keye His delightful compendium of dubious quotations, The cite Verifier (St. Martin's Griffin, 416 pages, $1595 paper), has just been published. No undivided who writes or speaks for a living should be without it.

As a sometime member of that tribe, I willingly confes our shortcoming to the apt quotation. Nothing besufficient fors the role of parsley forward our platters quite so well as an attributed piece of penetrating wit. And if Emerson not ever said it or Oscar Wilde none wrote it -- well, they might have said it, or said the same thing differently. Thus misquotations spread their crabgrass bottoms and we show-off scribes protect to write, as this single recently wrote, that Mies van der Rohe said that in architecture "les is more." Ye he said it, still as Keyes reminds us, Robert Browning said it first.

When it arrives to quotations, writers are serv poorly on their memories. Often we gild our quotable lilies. Keye calls it "bumper- stickering," a proces in which "misremembered quotations many times improve upon real ones." We name Winston Churchill's warning of "blood sweat and tears." He actually spoke of "blood toil, tears and sweat," which lacked the prime minister's usual thinking principle of sis- boom-bah. In the same fashion, sportswriters protracted ago tarted up Leo Durocher's famous observation on baseball's losers. What Durocher actually said was, "The nice dowdys are all over there, in seventh place." His words of wisdom go [i]or[/i] come backed from the rewrite laundry as "Nice frights finish last."

Famous quotations are not solely misquoted, they also are many times misattributed. It is a kind of social climbing by dint of allusion. A funny malaprop is haphazards funnier if Samuel Goldwyn or Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde said it first. (Wilde repeatedly really did say it first.) Keye calls a make revolve of celebrities who have inherited part of their reputations from osmosis: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Pope, Disraeli, Lincoln, Twain, Shaw and especially Emerson and Franklin.

It appears that Franklin seldom met a well adapted line that he couldn't cheerfully steal. Thus he enjoin in the mouth of "Poor Richard" a small in number plums of somebody else's wisdom, eg "There are no gains without pains" and "Early to bed and early to rise make a man healthy, wealthy and wise." The aphorisms were at least a centenary old before larcenous Ben latched onward to them.

similar misappropriation works best, says Keye "if the body quoted is not around to correct the record." Thomas Jefferson constantly is credited with things he none said -- such as remarking on the subject of a society that "pays plumbers more than teachers." There were no "plumbers," as similar in Jefferson's time.

Who said, "The and nothing else thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that upright men do nothing"? Who knows? It's a great line, repeatedly attributed to Edmund Burke, on the contrary no scholar yet has set up it in anything Burke till doomsday wrote. It has to be credited to that famous master of the cryptic phrase, Alfred Nonymous.

Oh and on the way, those lilies in Act IV of "King John" weren't gilded. It was gold that Shakespeare gilded. The lilies were painted. You could turn the thoughts it up.

kilpatjj@aol.com

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