Garbage, garbage everywhere

For those who don’t know, I have a large quotations database I keep online, WIST (“Wish I’d Said That”). It’s been a labor of love for many, many years.

I end up doing a major revision or update to it about once a year, since it’s a fairly major semi-manual effort (see here for more details).

For this year’s effort, rather than focusing on adding more quotations (though there will be some), I decided I wanted to make my citations better. After all, there are eleventy-zillion quotation pages out there, but for the most part you’re lucky if you get the person’s full name, and their born/died range is a true luxury. Asking to know where a particular quotation came from is almost beyond the pale.

But that shouldn’t be the case. The liberal arts major in me says, “Hey, if you’re going to cite something, cite it well.” I’ve always put a lot of effort into finding out who the heck Joe Frim is (since “16th Century English educator” or “20th Century German general” provide different context for what Joe had to say). Now I’m going through and, for those quotes that don’t have such info, I’m trying to identify the work (and date) it first appeared in.

Not a trivial task, by any means. And since I don’t plan on taking the next few years off, sitting in research libraries, I’m doing the next best thing: using Google.

See, lots of what’s in the database is literary, and a lot of those works are on-line by name (plus there are usually some literary types who have actually bothered to give citations for these things). Ditto for historical personages.

Foreign folks, and ancient sources (Aristotle, Athansius) are a bit more difficult, since the wording of the quotation may change depending on who’s doing the translating.

I’m not sweating it too much when I can’t find a given cite. But where I can, it feels like another puzzle piece plunked into place, another blank field filled in.

But there’s something interesting about the Internet. There’s a lot of information out there. And there’s a lot of crap in that information. Crap that is carefully preserved on-line, and, when spotted by others, carefully copied and propagated.

You can see this in a number of places. Common misquotations. Common misspellings of peoples’ names (Clement Atlee vs. Clement Attlee). And so forth. You just know that they’ve been passed, bucket-brigade style, from one site to the next.

Usually there’s a way to sift through the noise to get to real signal. Some sources are more reliable than others (Bartleby. Xrefer. Even Snopes). Usually more complete sites are more reliable than those with just the speaker/writer’s misspelled name as the cite.

Failing that, you can sometimes get enough clues from what the majority says to figure out how to further pin it down. If everyone (who mentions it) says that Joe Frim uttered those immortal words in The Idiot’s Guide to Making Babies, and there’s one site out there that says it was Blooms of Amaranth, it’s probable that the majority is right (though not always, and if you look more closely, you might find that Joe’s only quoted in TIGtMB, and the real cite actually is BoA).

And then there’s Auerbach.

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

Was that said by Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882), a German writer? Or was it uttered by Red Auerbach, a US basketball coach.

Certainly, on first blush, Berthold seems the man. It’s a very literary quote, the sort you would imagine a German writer saying. Not that basketball coaches are all illiterate dummies, but, still.

So do a Google search on it. Go ahead.

It’s a pretty popular quote, particularly on music-oriented sites (duh). Nobody cites the source other than the author. And about half of the sites say it’s Berthold, and half say it’s Red.

I’m pretty certain the two of them are not the same person. I suspect strongly that somewhere, someone saw the quote attributed to “Auerbach” and said, “Oh, Red Auerbach, the famous basketball coach. Huh. Didn’t know he liked music that much,” and then made the citation more “complete” — and that this misattribution has spread through the Net like kudzu, competing quite sucessfully with the Berthold citations.

Or maybe someone saw the quote, said, “No way that was said by a basketball coach,” found the Berthold name, and decided that was the right one. There’s no way for me to easily tell without a lot more research. And with 4500-odd quotes, I’m not that obsessive.

So I’ll leave it as Berthold, but I’ll add a note that it’s sometimes attributed to Red. And that’s that.

Lots of garbage out there. But if you are just a little discriminating, there’s a lot of good stuff, too.