Quotation marks don't make it so

Conservative clackers are throwing around a quote and attributing it to Nancy Pelosi.

You don't need [G-d] anymore, you have us democrats.

A Google™ search for the full string of the quote brings up a few pages of results. The quote looks like it made the rounds in a list of quotations by "great orators" in politics. The joke sneers at the current democratic leaders by comparing them to the historical giants: Andrew Jackson, FDR, Truman and Kennedy. The new classics are in there. Bill Clinton's question about the definition of is. Barack Obama's 57 states. All the proof some people need that today's political party is made of fools.

The Pelosi quote is acting quite young. And perhaps apocryphal. All of the sources below attribute the quote along with the extra information said back in 2006 after Pelosi's name. Several include it in parentheses. This has cut-and-paste all over it.

The is the type of faithfulness that occurs when a line is sent around to a lot of people, probably in a forwarded email from your aunt. All your conservative cousins like the list, and nobody bothers to type it out, so the contents don't shift in transit.

A commenter here has done a little massaging of the line, writing that Pelosi said 'You don't need [G-d]; we're going to take care of you.'

Here in a February 24 2009 post.

Here in a February 10 2009 comment.

Here in a December 30 2008 post.

Here in a November 13 2008 comment.

Here in an October 29 2008 comment.

Here in an October 22 2008 post.

Here in a Sept 10 2008 forum post.

Here in an October 10 2007 forum post.

The October 2007 post looks like an early appearance but it seems an unlikely original source. It's also not an identical result. The line ends with "you have the Democrats" and no year is given.

This Free Republic post by Kimmers indeed claims an email as the source. An interesting detail: one commenter notes that the Pelosi quote is unfamiliar.

A little searching for the favored title of the piece and we find the history of these drafts:

This March 18 2004 post by David Flanagan is titled Great Orators of the Democratic Party and it starts off with the four quotes from Jackson FDR Truman and JFK. The current fool in 2004 was Kerry.

Four months later in this post Evilwhiteguy throws in a new Kerry quote.

By 2005 in this post Learning Richard has moved on to Howard Dean.

A search for <"great orators" democratic party> shows that this goes back a while. And it looks like Pelosi was thrown in sometime last year. At least in the online versions. Well that would make sense if she said it in 2006.

So I'm still looking for the source of the attribution, but I have found so little evidence of its veracity that I'll go out on a limb and guess that it's a complete fake. Even with a wider net we get very few hits. Just the first half of the quote alongside the search term 'pelosi' brings up only a handful of pages.*

It's also a good idea to check the Google™ News results. The full string search yields not a single hit. The first half of the line: nothing. the first half without quotes alongside the name Pelosi: 35 unrelated results.

This precious little nugget of mockable wisdom looks to be the product of some snide alchemy.

---

*Initial results promise 700+ hits, but that estimate gets whittled down quickly.

Is sloppy the new moist?

From an AP story about Sean Avery's NHL suspension

“I’m really happy to be back in Calgary; I love Canada,” he said. “I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my (former girlfriends). I don’t know what that’s about, but enjoy the game tonight.” He then walked out.

Legend: (former girlfriends) = sloppy seconds

What's wrong with the line? Too picturesque? Too evocative? Or is it the dismissiveness of referring to a person in such an objectifying manner?

When I first heard Avery make the comment about sloppy seconds I thought he was talking about all the goals that other players make from picking up rebounds of his shots on goal. Seriously.

Quotidian complaints

This is what love of language has become.

I was just talking to my students today about this. Not the overuse of quotation marks in writing--but the peevologists who complain about it.

AP writer Jocelyn Noveck just gave Bethany Keeley's blog a big boost. And of course I'm a little jealous. Keeley started the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks in 2005 and started collecting submissions and posting pictures of signs posters ads documents...all illustrating the scourge of baffling quotation marks.

Due credit: the posts and the comments often work to explain or understand the rhetorical reasons for the quotes.

The article (perhaps more than the blog) persists with references to certain devices as annoying and unnecessary abuses misuses missteps and problems.

Noveck calls these "linguistic concers" and labels Keeley a "language-lover" which is too often used with the connotation of intolerance. Tho Keeley defends her generous spirit saying she doesn't feel superior to those whose usage she highlights.

'I don't consider myself a prescriptivist or a pedant,' she says (really). 'So I'm open to critiques of my own language. I make plenty of mistakes myself.'

I wouldn't call these quotation marks a mistake. They can be overused and they often lose their effect. But it really has nothing to do with grammar. I'd say this is as much a grammatical issue as emoticons italics and bold typeface are.

The story then takes a very odd jump to the overuse of quotations. Not quotation marks. Quotations.

'I have a thing against overuse of quotations, period,' says [Pat] Hoy, director of the expository writing program at New York University. 'Whether in academic or bureaucratic writing, it's giving up responsibility for what you're writing. It's a pushing aside of the responsibility to be the major thinker in the piece.'

So not only are quotation marks overused when they are not used only to mark attribution to a speaker or writer other than the person typing; now they're overused when they set off the very type of passage the peevologists are telling us they should mark: Only use them to set off quotations. But don't set off too many quotations! The salient connection is the tone of a people-do-bad-things-with-language fixation. Later in the article is fleeting mention of another blog that "tracks abuses of the word 'literally.'" I'm guessing that hopefully and singular their will soon have their own website...if they don't have one already.
[Update:
I cut out a few sentences in which Hoy is quoted regarding an early essay rejection that taught him not to quote so heavily. Perhaps I learned from it too.]

Are we Safir?

I'm guessing that Howard Safir's last name was originally pronounced something like staffer, Zamfir, sapphire...something like one of those. But as he is one of the increasingly sampled voices on national security issues and given his career track with law enforcement, I'm sure he smiles at the safer pronunciation. It doesn't make him good at the job, but it likely makes a few easily influenced minds out there think "hey, he has the right name . . . I'm going to stop evaluating now." Never mind that we all know how irrelevant phonology is to semantics.

In other words: it may not be true - but I'll believe it because it'd be neat if it is.

But it reminds me of the quote I heard by Benjamin Franklin:
He who sacrifices liberty for security deserves neither.

No wait. I think he said
If we restrict liberty to attain security we will lose them both.

Hold on. I'm pretty sure it was actually
A society that gives up a little liberty to gain a little security deserves neither and loses both.

Franklin never said any of those. At least we have no reliable record of him saying them. But don't they make the point so well? Especially now that we can use wise ol' Ben to support our grumbles about the foolishness of our current federal executive administration? Franklin is smarter than Bush so I want a quote by Franklin that disagrees with Bush. Alas these are not his.

Here's my question. Why do quotes carry such weight? We're all guilty of hitching our arguments to the soaring wagons of the philosophers' utterances. Especially in academia. But let's look for instance at that first quote mistakenly attributed to Franklin. Why would someone no longer deserve freedom or liberty just because they make a foolish choice of prioritization? Does that mean that anyone who demands every right and surrenders security deserves both? Is that why that last quote looks so good - because by endangering both freedom and security the foolish citizen forfeits all?

The problem with these quotes is they are predictive. They assume morals and promise judgment. To use them in argument simply says "I agree with this value." That's a fair statement but not a good argument. I like Mr Franklin's actual quote much better. In Poor Richard's Almanac he writes

  Sell not virtue to purchase wealth   
nor liberty to purchase power. 

These suggestions are unabashedly about values. The quote does not sneak under the rhetorical radar as true-because-of-it's-rhythm-eloquence-and-wit.

In an interview a few weeks ago I heard Mr Safir respond to the question of racial profiling with the clarification that he was not supporting "racial" profiling; he was supporting "terrorist" profiling. Oh well of course. Great. If all he wants to do is catch terrorists then I'm behind him "a hundert purcent." Here's the problem - in "racial" profiling those who are identifiable because of cultural markers are suspected. In "terrorist" profiling those who are identifiable by the same cultural markers are suspected.

Mr Safir has forgotten that changing the phonology of a policy doesn't do anything to change the semantics.

Here's my proverb for the day.

He who surrenders the rights of others
to make himself secure
will lose the respect of all his brothers
and is an ass for sure.

I just believe it.