Believe it or not, I hate nitpicking. I hate it when I do it, and I hate it when others do it. So posting this made me hesitate a little as I thought: Now aren't you just a wee bit anal?
No. What I found is so inane and self-important that I had to post haste.
A recent timewaster appeared in the margins of an article I'd read: a link billed itself as the "Famous Misquotes Quiz." Having just had dinner, the idea of an innocuous quiz appealed to me - what better way than test my memory? Once I was pretty proud of myself when correcting a common misquote (It's "A foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"), so the chance to repeat history sounded good.
As it turns out, the quiz is a farce. For one thing, it's not a "misquote quiz," it's a grammar test. Misquoting is just as it says: you quote someone wrongly. In that case, explain this question:
In "Guilty," her duet with Barry Gibb, Barbra Streisand sings, "Out on the street anybody you meet got a heartache of their own." Which is the correct lyric?
Strictly speaking, the correct answer is a). Why? Because that's the actual lyric. The quiz's "correct" answer is c), which is then explained in exhaustive detail. So instead of figuring out what someone really did say, your job is to decide what he/she should have said. Not quite what "misquote" means. (Mind you, this is an Encarta production - the folks your kids are plagiarizing or citing in their class papers.)
Self-appointed masters of language reality can be a royal pain in the ass, especially when they fall down on the job. Take this question:
The poet Robert Frost once said, "I had a lovers quarrel with the world."
OK, if he said that, what's he getting wrong? How the hell do you pronounce an apostrophe? The quizmeister should have put "The poet Robert Frost once wrote..." - if indeed it was written. I don't know, really. But if you're going to get all huffy about stuff, be able to dish it out the way you think it oughta be. (That's right, oughta.)
What tops off this Roman shower is its less-than-subtle revisionism. Here:
In George Washington's farewell address to the nation, he wrote, "Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports." How should the sentence read?
I believe the proper Netiquette response to this is, WTF??? By this logic, everyone - and I mean everyone - who put pen to paper before 2008 is a complete Mo-Ron. Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Shakespeare: Mo-Rons all.
I'm not going to go into the finer points of capitalization or the ambiguities of punctuation's function; it is enough to say that for the time and place, George Washington knew damn well what he was doing, and he managed just fine. What he wrote, and how he wrote it, conformed to the conventions of American orthography around him.
Now the last time I expressed concern about how words were so easily abused, I was called anal. (By the coordinator of an adult literacy program, no less. I wish I were kidding.) History will probably repeat itself; after all, it's just a quiz. Right? It's just a quiz proffered by a reputable information resource, a quiz that happens to be so ill-considered that it makes a mockery of the very thing it claims to uphold - good use of language.
So, what is the Misquote quiz really like? This.
(Image cheerfully swiped from http://tns-www.lcs.mit.edu/~izzy/barfbag.html and photoshopped like there's no tomorrow.)
