You’ve probably heard, and possibly wielded, these famous quotations:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well.
The ends justify the means.
Be the change that you want to see in the world.
Play it again, Sam.
If you have a particularly discerning eye, you might have a suspicion about what’s going on here. It’s true: none of these quotes is exactly correct. It’s not “Money is the root of all evil”; the correct quote is “[For] the love of money is the root of all evil” (emphasis mine), which comes from 1 Timothy in the New Testament.
The exact Yorick quote is from Hamlet (V,1): “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” The others are imperfect quotations from (in order) Machiavelli, Gandhi, and the film Casablanca. (In that movie, although both Ilsa and Rick ask Sam to “play it,” referring to the song “As Time Goes By,” no one asks Sam to play it again.)
When people get words wrong, we might describe their errors as malapropisms or solecisms or eggcorns, depending on the nature of the error. But when people get a quotation wrong, we describe the error as … well, I suppose we can call it a misquotation. But over on the kith.org blog, the author (Jed) proposes the excellent and new-to-me term Casablank.
Per the post, the term Casablank could be used to describe “the category of common misquotations, such that the misquotation is the actually well-known quote.” I chose the examples earlier specifically because I think most everyone’s used them. Note that a Casablank is different from a misattributed quotation, though it’s not uncommon for a popular quotation to be both incorrect and misattributed.
Why do Casablanks exist? In some cases, at least, the Casablank is more succinct than the original. Take that Gandhi quote. The original is …
That’s not nearly as snappy as “Be the change you want to see in the world,” and the Casablank fits a lot better onto a bumper sticker.
Jed thinks that Casablanks are rarer for more recent aphorisms, because it’s easier these days to find the article or movie clip or interview that people want to cite. But even so, there are pages of misquoted movie lines, many from recent movies (example in Wikipedia). For example, in Wall Street, Gordon Gekko does not say “Greed is good,” or not exactly. (Actual cite: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”)
I’d agree with Jed that recent quotations are easier to research these days, but I’m not convinced that it means people actually want to do that research. Did Al Gore ever say “I invented the Internet”? Did Sarah Palin say “I can see Russia from my house”? Depending on your political leanings, it might just be more convenient and amusing for you to stick with the Casablank.
As an aside, if you’re interested in quotations and their sources, I can recommend the Quote Investigator site from “Garson O’Toole” (apparently a pseudonym) and the book The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes.
On to origins. The other day I was talking to my wife and wanted to say “last week,” but I fumbled for the phrase and somehow ended up blurting out “yesterweek.” Although I was unhappy that I seem to be losing the ability to remember words (lethologica), I wasn’t displeased that I’d spontaneously generated a new (to me) term. But on reflection, it made we wonder about yesterday and the yester prefix generally.
I know enough German to know that their word for yesterday is gestern, which is a pretty obvious cognate. (This is one of a number of words where German g matches English y, as in Auge for “eye.”) But then, if the yester part by itself means “yesterday,” why do we have the -day part?
So. Old English had the word geostran (or variants) that meant “yesterday.” It occasionally shows up as a standalone word, but even back then it was mostly used in compounds like gyrstandæg and gister-day. The phrase gystran niht shows up in Beowulf; the OED puzzles over whether this is a compound like yesterday or just an adverb + noun.
The yester part seems to go back to a much older, pre-English root that meant, well, “yesterday.” That same root produced the word hesternus (“of yesterday”) in Latin. In Old Norse, the word became gaer, which could mean either “tomorrow” or “yesterday.” The innovation in English is that we seem to have generalized yester to mean “preceding.” This gave us some flexibility in how to use that yester part beyond just referring to the previous day.
In fact, we have a number of yester- words, like yesternight, yesteryear, and yes, yesterweek. Although from my perspective I invented the term yesterweek on the spot, it doesn’t mean the word didn’t already exist. But it does mean that yester is still productive, as in, we can add it to time-related terms even today. As evidence I offer that Urban Dictionary has the word yesterminute.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
In the Wall Street example, what’s the “for lack of a better word” attached to? is that [something like greed] is good, or greed is [something like good]? And which of those meanings is closer to the Casablank? I thought it was the second one, but now that I’ve written them down I’m not sure.
I took it as attached to “greed,” so that the meaning was something like “greed [which isn’t the perfect word for the idea] is good.” It’s a subtle difference, but my take is that he’s saying not greed in the mortal-sins sense is good, but that [a thing that feels something like greed] is good [for driving the economy or whatever].
On the Wikipedia page that lists misquoted movie lines, the differences are often very small (e.g. not “Luke, I am your father” but “No, I am your father.”) But they’re still Casablanks, I suppose, if the definition is that the incorrect version is the better-known one. wdyt?