What is Churchillian drift?

[Dingbat]

What is Churchillian drift?

Long ago, I coined the term "Churchillian Drift" to describe the process
whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one
side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon
would be ascribed what, actually, a lesser-known political figure had
said. The process occurs in all fields. - Nigel Rees
https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/12/nigel-rees-misquotes-opinions-rees.html#74c4e0bb565b
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchillian_Drift

[Snidely]

On Tuesday or thereabouts, Dingbat asked ...

He ends the first link nicely, doesn't he?

/dps

--
Trust, but verify.

[occam]

Never heard of Nigel Rees. Do we think it likely that the term will be
attributed to someone more famous than him, in due course? Very likely.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

He gets the ones Dorothy Parker and Mark Twain didn't want.


--
athel

[J. J. Lodder]

Before him, the sociologist (of science) Robert Merton
invented the 'Matthew effect', for credit for discoveries in science.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect>

"For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have
abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken
away."

Merton's 'Matthew effect'is much better,
because not tied to any particular scientist.
"Einstein drift', or 'Feynman drift' would be a poor substitute,

Jan

[Horace LaBadie]

In article <g524vi...@mid.individual.net>,

Was that Oscar Wilde or Abraham Lincoln?

[Peter T. Daniels]

Don't forget the Oscars (Wilde and Levant) and J. A. M. Whistler ("You will,
Oscar, you will.")

[Joseph C. Fineman]

Dingbat <ranjit_...@yahoo.com> writes:

> Long ago, I coined the term "Churchillian Drift" to describe the process
> whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one
> side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon
> would be ascribed what, actually, a lesser-known political figure had
> said. The process occurs in all fields. - Nigel Rees

Cf. _They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and
Misleading Attributions_, by Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George
(Oxford U.P., 1989).
--
--- Joe Fineman jo...@verizon.net

||: Bullies love silly rules. :||

[Ross]

I have just become aware of an entire speech mis-attributed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen

I have believed and repeated the Vonnegut attribution for several years.
Mary Schmich, the real author, is a Chicago journalist. She sounds interesting: used to write "Brenda Star, Reporter"; plays ragtime piano. (Or could she be a
character invented by Vonnegut?)

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at 11:18:14 PM UTC-5, Ross wrote:
> On Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 11:40:26 AM UTC+13, Joseph C. Fineman wrote:
> > Dingbat <ranjit_...@yahoo.com> writes:

> > > Long ago, I coined the term "Churchillian Drift" to describe the process
> > > whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one
> > > side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon
> > > would be ascribed what, actually, a lesser-known political figure had
> > > said. The process occurs in all fields. - Nigel Rees
> > Cf. _They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and
> > Misleading Attributions_, by Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George
> > (Oxford U.P., 1989).
>

> I have just become aware of an entire speech mis-attributed:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen
>
> I have believed and repeated the Vonnegut attribution for several years.
> Mary Schmich, the real author, is a Chicago journalist. She sounds interesting: used to write "Brenda Star, Reporter"; plays ragtime piano. (Or could she be a
> character invented by Vonnegut?)

The cartoon character was Brenda Starr.

I'm surprised that the name "Mary Schmich" is unfamiliar to me, since I
was in Chicago for the first 5 years of her alleged stint at the Trib,
and her supposed partner Eric Zorn is well known. She may be a figment
like Cecil Adams, another great Chicago columnist.

(I also never heard the "sunscreen" aspect of the Vonnegut speech.)

[Madrigal Gurneyhalt]

Have many figments won the Pulitzer Prize? The biography of the very real
Mary Theresa Schmich, including the story of how her words came to be
attributed to Vonnegut is found at ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Schmich

[Peter T. Daniels]

That's where I got the nugget about Eric Zorn.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2018-11-14 22:40:24 +0000, Joseph C. Fineman said:

> Dingbat <ranjit_...@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> Long ago, I coined the term "Churchillian Drift" to describe the process
>> whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one
>> side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon
>> would be ascribed what, actually, a lesser-known political figure had
>> said. The process occurs in all fields. - Nigel Rees
>
> Cf. _They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and
> Misleading Attributions_, by Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George
> (Oxford U.P., 1989).

I had a look at that, and it turns out there is an example worthy of
discussion here.

They say:

> BLOOD-SWEAT-TEARS QUOTE "I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat, and tears."
> When Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain soon after the outbreak
> of World War II, his first address to the House of Commons on May 13,
> 1940, contained the sentence: "I have nothing to offer but blood and
> toil, tears and sweat."

I have never heard the so-called misquote; I have always heard the
correct version. I wonder, therefore, if the misquote is something
invented in the USA. What about other speakers of British English: have
you come across the toilless version?


--
athel

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

The phrase "blood, sweat, and tears" is centuries old and was used by
Churchill himself before he became Prime Minister.
First 4 quotes from the OED:

a1649 W. Drummond Hist. Scotl. (1655) 19 If Princes could keep
their own, and that which justly belongeth unto them, they could
not be urged to draw such extraordinary Subsidies from the blood,
sweat, and tears of their people.
1843 Freeman's Jrnl. (Dublin) 20 July 3/2 With our blood, sweat,
and tears, we were doom'd to plod.
1889 G. B. Shaw Fabian Ess. Socialism 23 With all its
energy..its ferocious sweating and slave-driving, its prodigality
of blood, sweat and tears, what has it [sc. private property]
heaped up, over and above the pittance of its slaves?
** 1939 W. S. Churchill in Daily Tel. 23 Feb. 14/4 Here are new
structures of national life erected upon blood, sweat and tears.

It was more than a year later that he became PM:
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/blood-toil-tears-and-sweat-2/

On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. When he
met his Cabinet on May 13 he told them that “I have nothing to offer
but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He repeated that phrase later in
the day when he asked the House of Commons for a vote of confidence
in his new all-party government. The response of Labour was
heart-warming; the Conservative reaction was luke-warm. They still
really wanted Neville Chamberlain. For the first time, the people
had hope but Churchill commented to General Ismay: “Poor people,
poor people. They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster
for quite a long time.”

--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

[Peter T. Daniels]

I never heard the misquote --- except in the name of some rock group --
until I read a discussion of its inadequacy in a treatment of the effects
of the sound of language on its impact. Churchill, being rather good at
oratory, wouldn't have ended a period with the weak "tears," but went for
the punch of the stop in "sweat." Unfortunately when Churchill used it as
the title of a memoir, he changed it to "Blood, Sweat, and Tears." (*The
Orchestra of the Language (a study of the Impact on the mind of sound images
in the art of writing)*, by Ernest Robson [1959], 113-15.)

But not with the first "and": "blood, toil, tears, and sweat."

[Mark Brader]

As to "blood, toil, tears, and sweat", I would first like to quote what
Rudolf Flesch says in his classic 1946 book "The Art of Plain Talk":

# How about the rhythm of the famous Churchill quotation "I have nothing
# to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat?" Churchill, using a
# four-part rhythm as is his custom, built the sentence up toward the
# word "sweat" (the speech was meant to encourage people in their war
# effort). Result: everybody now misquotes "blood, sweat and tears",
# using a different, three-part rhythm and ending up in the defeatist
# "tears". ...
#
# The famous Churchill metaphor is ... more trouble. First, all readers
# and listeners have skipped the "toil" so that there are now three
# items left; and what they have chiefly in common is that they are
# wet. So the reader gets a vague notion that Churchill used a little
# word picture of three wet things instead of saying *war*; and that's
# that. Actually, Churchill, in his balanced phrase, described the
# battlefront (blood), the homefront (toil), the consequences of battle
# (tears), and the consequences of homefront toil (sweat), putting them
# all in chronological and logical order.

(Flesch's point being that you use that kind of high-flown language at
your own risk.)

Athel Cornish-Bowden:

>> I have never heard the so-called misquote; I have always heard the
>> correct version. I wonder, therefore, if the misquote is something
>> invented in the USA.

It was certainly *popularized* there by the US publishers of one of
Churchill's books (see below), and as to how common it is, note what
Flesch says, and note that he was writing in the US.

Peter Duncanson:

> The phrase "blood, sweat, and tears" is centuries old and was used by
> Churchill himself before he became Prime Minister.

Back in 2005, Ben Zimmer wrote:
||| So if "b, s & t" had been floating around before Churchill made his
||| speech, then it would make sense if Churchill's quote was modified
||| as it circulated to correspond with a preexisting expression.

And I wondered:
|| Fascinating. This makes me wonder if Churchill wrote the line "blood,
|| toil, tears, and sweat" by starting with the earlier expression and
|| constructing a rebalanced version.

And later I posted this:

| Well, this thread and the other one about "up with which I will not
| put" led me to browsing the web site <http://www.winstonchurchill.org>
| of the Churchill Centre, and I've had an exchange of email with their
| editor, Richard M. Langworth, about both topics.
|
| It turns out that he had written a short article on this exact subject
| just this year for the Centre's quarterly, "Finest Hour". The article
| was titled "'Bloor, Toil, Tears and Sweat': Evolution of a Phrase", and
| he kindly forwarded me a copy of it.
|
| And it seems I guessed right. In fact Churchill not only knew the
| earlier expression, *he had used it himself*, earlier than the 1939
| example that Ben cited where someone else used it. (Although not
| earlier than the 1846 example!)
|
| And what's more, even before *that*, he had used a two-term version.
| This was in 1899: "As for the result, that, as I think Mr. Grobelaar
| knows, is only a question of time and money expressed in terms of
| blood and tears." He used the same phrase in 1900, again referring
| to the Boer War, in suggesting that by promoting the right officers,
| "...there will be less blood and tears when the next war comes."
| He used this version of the phrase again in June 1939, referring
| to the coming war.
|
| In 1931 he added sweat to the formula, but in this wording: "Their
| sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain." This
| time the subject is WW1.
|
| And in February 1939 he used "blood, sweat and tears". Referring
| to the Spanish Civil War, he wrote: "But here are new structures of
| national life erected upon blood, sweat and tears, which are not
| dissimilar and therefore capable of being united."
|
| As for toil, he used that in a similar expression in 1936. Except
| for the profiteers, he said, "war spells nothing but toil, waste,
| sorrow and torment to the vast mass of ordinary folk in every land."
|
| And in 1940 he put it all together: "blood, toil, tears and sweat".
|
|
| So I was wrong to suggest that his American publishers, in using the
| title "Blood, Sweat, and Tears", were promulgating a misquote --
| they could have found the words in an article Churchill wrote during
| the time period of the speeches in the book.
|
| As to that title, Richard Langworth also forwarded me an excerpt
| from his book "A Connoisseur's Guide to the Books of Sir Winston
| Churchill", listing all the different editions of the book.
|
| The title "Blood, Sweat, and Tears" (spelled with various numbers
| of commas) was used for Canadian as well as American editions,
| but never [for] British ones. Ironically, the first Canadian
| edition -- the most expensively produced of all -- actually omits
| the "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech. Anyway, it does seem
| likely to me that the phrase gained popularity more from this book
| than from anything else.
|
| The British title "Into Battle" -- also used for an edition
| published in China -- is the title of this WW1 poem:
| <http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/mia_intobattle.htm>.
| An excerpt from the poem was added to the book after the first
| few printings.
|
| Two other titles used for the book have been "Their Finest Hour"
| (an abridged 1941 Canadian edition) and "Churchill in His Own
| Words" (1966, British and American).
--
Mark Brader "People with whole brains, however, dispute
Toronto this claim, and are generally more articulate
m...@vex.net in expressing their views." -- Gary Larson

My text in this article is in the public domain.

[Jerry Friedman]

On Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 4:29:48 PM UTC-7, Mark Brader wrote:
> As to "blood, toil, tears, and sweat", I would first like to quote what
> Rudolf Flesch says in his classic 1946 book "The Art of Plain Talk":
>
> # How about the rhythm of the famous Churchill quotation "I have nothing
> # to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat?" Churchill, using a
> # four-part rhythm as is his custom, built the sentence up toward the
> # word "sweat" (the speech was meant to encourage people in their war
> # effort). Result: everybody now misquotes "blood, sweat and tears",
> # using a different, three-part rhythm and ending up in the defeatist
> # "tears". ...
> #
> # The famous Churchill metaphor is ... more trouble. First, all readers
> # and listeners have skipped the "toil" so that there are now three
> # items left; and what they have chiefly in common is that they are
> # wet. So the reader gets a vague notion that Churchill used a little
> # word picture of three wet things instead of saying *war*; and that's
> # that. Actually, Churchill, in his balanced phrase, described the
> # battlefront (blood), the homefront (toil), the consequences of battle
> # (tears), and the consequences of homefront toil (sweat), putting them
> # all in chronological and logical order.
>
> (Flesch's point being that you use that kind of high-flown language at
> your own risk.)

...

Indeed. The problem with "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" is that
"sweat" is a conventional metonymy for "toil". The four-noun phrase
is an unbalanced as "blood, grief, tears, and sweat" would be. "Blood,
sweat, and tears" in any sequence is a great improvement.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Mack A. Damia]

You've made me so very happy.

[RHDraney]

Oh, Lucy, you just so damn *bad*!...r