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I've always been fascinated by these misattributions of wise/witty sayings to famous figures. The words aren't allowed to stand on their own, they have to be vo
by reedwolf 6y ago
I've always been fascinated by these misattributions of wise/witty sayings to famous figures. The words aren't allowed to stand on their own, they have to be vouched for by a suitably impressive and high status person.
My favorite is how, even in the realm of conspiracies that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, the posited true author is invariably another famous Elizabethan personality, e.g. Francis Bacon.
God forbid the Shakespeare plays were actually written by some random nobody.
- leephillips 6y agoI have a theory of “quotation attraction”. It explains my observations that a good saying from someone relatively obscure often gets misattributed to someone more famous, especially someone witty such as Dorothy Parker. Any famous, witty person will have a bunch of cool quotations attiributed to her that were actually said by someone else.
- garbagetime 6y ago>My favorite is how, even in the realm of conspiracies that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, the posited true author is invariably another famous Elizabethan personality, e.g. Francis Bacon. Counter-example: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amelia-bassano-william-shakespeare/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amelia-bassano-william-sha...
- JadeNB 6y ago> My favorite is how, even in the realm of conspiracies that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, the posited true author is invariably another famous Elizabethan personality, e.g. Francis Bacon. Surely, if such conspiracy theorising is to be anything other than random guessing, one needs some sort of corpus of the proposed author's work to which to compare. It's probably less than people don't think that a nobody could have written them than that there's no reasonable way to test that hypothesis.