Tag Quotes

Oh That Jack!

Michael 8 Comments

Not too long ago I was working on prompts for whatever I might want to prompt myself with and whenever I feel promptable. One of them is “Would I rather be a jack of all trades or a master of one.” My daughter say my list and said, “You know that’s not right.” I said, “Yes, but it’s closer that what most people think.”

You’ve probably said it or read it or heard it many times. “A jack of all trades, a master of none,” usually spoken derisively of someone more talented than the speaker. Obviously the speaker’s talents do not include reading. Buried between my prompt and the usual dismissal is the actual quote. Do you know what it is? I’ll let you think about that for a while and then we’ll come back to it.

That prompted us to think about sayings we get wrong, or those we pick or choose only a part of the actual quotation that is far more complex, but we stop short of the complete thought. For example, no, the customer is not always right. Harry Selfridge actually encouraged his employees to not question a customer’s taste, not the customer’s correctness with his whole message, “The customer is always right in the matters of taste.” An interesting side note to Mr. Selfridge. Many, many, many years before he founded the London-based retail empire that bears his name, he was born in Wisconsin and his first experience in selling was delivering newspapers after school (before he dropped out) in Jackson, Michigan. (And yes, I know somebody is going to say, no, that originated in France in the early 1900s about a restauranteur who said “no matter how ill-tempered is the diner, treat him with civility,” which is a completely different thought process.)

We all recognize that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Does heaven have a similar comparison? Why, yes, yes it does. When William Congreve wrote Act III of The Mourning Bride he wrote, “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.” Personally, I think love turning to hatred is more frightening than a ticked off lady. But then, I guess if she was really a lady, she’d not express her displeasure over much anyway.

One that doesn’t change the meaning at all is the complete quote that gave us ignorance is bliss, but it is so much more poetic. Hmm. Perhaps because it comes from a poem. Thomas Gray wrote in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, “Since sorrow never comes too late ⁠and happiness too swiftly flies? Thought would destroy their Paradise. No more; —where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”

Would you like me to make you an offer you can’t refuse. If you’re one of the billion or so people who claim to have been at the premiere of the Godfather, or one of the 400 who actually read the book, you would shake in your boots and beg for mercy thinking I intend to cause you bodily harm. It’s possible Mario Puzo remembered that line from the 1934 movie Burn ‘Em Up Barnes, about the owner of an apparently worthless piece of land. But rich oil speculators who know her land is worth more than a small fortune try to convince her to sell, sell, sell! John Drummond (played quite convincingly by Jason Robards’ father, Jason Robards (Sr.)) says, “I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse,” literally meaning he would offer her so much she would be foolish not to sell the land to him. So you might want to check with whomever is making the offer if they are a vintage cinephile fan or a more modern movie goer.

A most familiar misquote, or incomplete quote, is one of many traced to the Bible. That is the one about money being the root of all evil. Although during the first century of the Common Era money was not as ubiquitous, or as necessary as today, it still was, if you’ll excuse the inherent redundancy, valuable, and used even by those mentioned in the Bible. The full verse in 1 Timothy (6:10) is, “For the love of money is the root of all of evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Not quite the same thing.

Speaking of not quite the same, let’s get back to jack, as in the jack of all trades. Do you know the full quote? Jack was given to us by the man who may be responsible for more common sayings than either Benjamin Franklin or the Bible. That would be William Shakespeare. Maybe. Some sources attribute it Shakespeare although not from any of his dramatic writings, but from his colloquial pieces. Others attribute it to fellow 16th Century author Robert Greene, speaking about Shakespeare. Still others have it going back to the ancient Greeks probably because you can make an argument that some ancient Greek said almost everything now noteworthy. Anyway, the full quote, which is not an insult is, “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one.”

Do you know of any others? Share them in the comments. Even if you aren’t sure of the origin or original meaning, we’ll get to the bottom of it.

Speaking of sayings, do you know the first instance of “Have a good day.” We do, and we even included it in the most recent Uplift, the one where we claim that telling someone to have a good day could be the smartest thing you do today. Have a good day!

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Say What?

Michael 2 Comments

Did you hear last week about one of the Trump young’ns (actually I think a youngster-in-law) misquoting Lincoln in his or her speech (the youth or relative youth, not the sixteenth Mr. President)? It doesn’t matter what he said or she said or she said that he said. What matters is how often people are getting wrong things that have been documented for over 150 years. But then, the quote was one attributed to one who was once a living, breathing, actual, real person and real people have a tendency of saying things more than once and not getting it exactly the same each time. (“Oh yes, you’re probably thinking he said “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but when great grand daddy and him were chatting out on the sailboat in the bay he said “don’t go asking what you can and can’t do.” That was the line I was referring to.) But when people misquote the words of fictional characters is when you know you’re dealing with a seasoned misquoter.


Think of the number of times have you heard some variation of “Play it again, Sam,” probably the most misquoted movie quote of all time made even worse because everybody knows that wasn’t the line yet still toss into some random discussion, “As Bogie would say, play it again Sam!” (Technically it was Rick who never said that but that’s a post for a different day.) Misquoting literary and movie characters is an everyday occurence and, now, “Here’s the thing” (as Adrian Monk so often said), those words are written down and no matter how many times you read the book or watch the movie, that fictional person says those same words. Over and over. Always the same. And still…


Sometimes, like Play it again Sam, the misquote just feels right, like the original needed a little spiffing up.


Just the facts ma’am

  • Sergeant Joe Friday probably would have approved this more succinct phrase to his actual more mundane direction to many a witness, “All we want are the facts.”


Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor, not a [fill in the blank]!

  • Dr. McCoy indeed was a doctor, a classy doctor with military bearing not seen much anymore. With all his class and proper southern upbringing he never would use “Damn it” but modern times called for a firmer rebuff than his rather bland “I’m a doctor, not a…”


We don’t need no stinking badges

  • In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Fred C. Dobbs shouts down to the bandits who claim to be law enforcement officers to show his party their badges. Alfonso Bedoya playing the character identified only as Gold Hat replies with one of the best lines in cinematic history to be later bastardized to the often misquoted abbreviated version. The real line is, “Badges? We ain’t go no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”


Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

  • Another line unjustly shortened perhaps by one whose desire to appear literary is greater than his or her desire to read all five acts of The Mourning Bride to uncover Queen Zara’s lament early in Act III, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” Oddly it is from this William Congreve play, his only tragedy, that another famous misquote derives. “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast” so often is said to soothe savage beasts instead. Now that is tragic. 


Often truncated quotes appear to be just a desire to create something pithy out of really good dialogue that just won’t hold up under the fast pace of formal cocktail party rules discouraging soliloquies. Unfortunately sometimes when words are removed from the original lines the original meaning goes with them.


Now is the winter of our discontent 

  • That little piece of dialogue from Shakespeare’s Richard III would seem to imply that they were, or we are in the midst of a really miserable time. It is only when you hear or read Richard’s full sentence, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,” do you get the feeling that this is actually a great and happy time to be alive.


Money is the root of all evil

  • Another truncation that is more famous that the original line comes from what is said to be the best selling book of all time with over 5 billion copies in circulation, The Bible. You would think with that many opportunities to confirm it wouldn’t be misquoted. Probably shortened by dads confronted with teenagers wishing increases in their allowances, the abbreviated version is fair rebuttal. But in fairness to the author, the line from Paul’s letter to Timothy is “For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Timothy 6:10)


Sometimes the quote we know just isn’t the quote at all. 


A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do

  • So often heard from the mouths of teenage boys ready to step onto the playground with shoulders full of chips or ready to defend the honor of mistreated young siblings and weak friends (or so it seemed in the dark ages when I was a teenage boy) the line might have been one said by any of John Wayne’s portrayals. Closest to that are what The Ringo Kid says in Stagecoach, “Well, there’s some things a man just can’t run away from,” and a little closer still from Hondo in Hondo, “A man ought’a do what he thinks is best.” But maybe we just wanted it to be by John Wayne and even got the attribution wrong. Out of all of moviedom the closest of the closest of the close lines was by Charlton Heston speaking as Captain Colt Saunders in the quickly forgotten Three Violent People, “A man must do what he must do.”


And that brings us back to the most famous quote that was never spoken, Play it again Sam, just about always said with Bogart’s unforgettable lisped snarl. Of course his line was really, “You played it for her, you can play it for me! … If she can stand it, I can. Play it!” But the line closest to Play it again, Sam came a few scenes and a montage earlier and is spoken not drunkenly by Rick but very smoothly by Ingrid Bergman in the role of Ilsa. “Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake. … Play it Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By’.”


Notwithstanding the most famous quote that isn’t a quote, Casablanca endowed us with some of the most memorable quotes we use so often, “Round up the usual suspects,” “I stick my neck out for no man,” “Of all the gin joints in all the world…,” “We’ll always have Paris,” and the wonderful “Here’s looking at you kid.”


None of them, not the real, not the misquoted, not even the most famous quote that was never said, stand up to my personal favorite quote, a line from my personal favorite movie of all time, the closing line from Casablanca (also often misquoted as This is the start of a beautiful friendship) when Rick walks off with Louis (properly pronounced “Louie”) planning some assumed adventure with the Free French battalion in Brazzaville and says, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”