1. “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

This quotation attributed to Gandhi is a later invention by an unknown person, likely inspired by the following passage: “As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. . . . We need not wait to see what others do.”

2. “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.”

Gandhi was also credited with this pithy progression, but something like it was actually uttered in a speech at a union meeting in the United States in 1914: “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”

3. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

This is an amended version of a line by playwright William Congreve, who flourished around the turn of the eighteenth century. The actual comment is “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

4. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

As with many of these lines, the person to whom it is attributed — in this case, Voltaire, perhaps would have wished he had been so eloquent. This ringing pronouncement, however, derives not from the French philosopher’s own pen, but from an early-twentieth-century biography of him.

5. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

This is a slightly recast alteration of Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet’s query about how his mother likes the play he has, unbeknownst to her, scripted to prompt a guilty reaction from her and King Claudius, who Hamlet believes conspired to murder his father. She is saying that the character of the queen is trying too hard to appear innocent. The original, no better or worse — merely measured differently — is “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

6. “Money is the root of all evil.”

This alteration of a biblical verse, by omitting a vital element of the original, changes the meaning significantly. The verse actually reads, “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

7. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This misquotation lacks the equivocation of British historian Lord Action’s actual statement, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely” — and omits the blunt next sentence: “Great men are almost always bad men.”

8. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.”

The actual quote, from the same play from which the line in the third entry above is taken, is “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast.” The next line, elaborating on the theme, is “To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.”

9. “Nice guys finish last.”

Legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher wasn’t making a blanket statement when he uttered these four words. They are a contracted repetition of his assessment of a baseball team’s prospects for the season. The entire quotation is “All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys — finish last.”

10. “No rest for the wicked.”

This line, uttered jocularly by a busy person, perhaps as an excuse for departing, is probably inspired by the biblical verse “There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.”

11. “Now is the winter of our discontent.”

These first few words of Shakespeare’s Richard III are often expressed to mean “The present time is the winter of our discontent.” What the titular character means, however, is made clear by including the second part of the statement, which demonstrates that the phrase is merely a preface to the counterpoint of a reference to better times: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”

12. “Pride comes before a fall.”

This is a contracted version of the biblical verse “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

13. “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Mark Twain’s actual comment is more straightforward: “The report of my death is an exaggeration.” In addition, the statement is in reference not to a prematurely printed obituary but to a reporter’s inquiry about his health.

14. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

This quotation is a vast improvement over this vaguely similar statement by Irish-born British statesman Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

15. “Theirs but to do or die.”

The legendary phrase from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” has a subtly but significantly different penultimate word. The entire line reads, “Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die.”

16. “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”

The line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has been tidied up a bit. The original is “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.”

Two other well-known statements considered to be misquotes are actually later versions of lesser-known comments. Winston Churchill’s phrase “Blood, sweat, and tears,” widely believed to be an erroneous version of “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” is actually a more concise and euphonious update of the more extended form.

By the same token, “I laughed all the way to the bank” is an alleged misquotation (and misunderstanding of Liberace’s quip “I cried all the way to the bank,” but he actually did use laughed in response to a poor review of a financially successful concert of his. When he later won a lawsuit — with compensation — stemming from a newspaper’s veiled contention that he was gay (the nerve!), he altered the earlier utterance with a change of verb to reply to a query about whether the accusation made him distraught.

1. How to Distract People from the Fact That Your Book Is Educational by Making Them Laugh

Book: In a Sunburned Country (Bill Bryson)

Bryson, in this book and many others, sets out to entertain people — and does so with great flair (and success). But he also loves to share his knowledge (and his passion for knowledge) with readers, and enhances nutritious information with tasty toppings of humor and whimsy. This book about his travels through — and insights about — Australia (a nation that, given its environment, is even more improbably successful than the United States) delights as it informs.

Bryson has also written or edited books about science (A Brief History of Nearly Everything and others), language (The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way and others), and more, and even when his work doesn’t live up to expectations (At Home: A Short History of Private Life), it’s still fun and fascinating.

2. How to Top Off an Engrossing Story About Exploration with an Ironic Twist

Book: The Lost City of Z (David Grann)

Few tropes stir the romantic adventurer in us as much as a jungle-exploration saga, and this book, based on the archetypal expedition into Green Hell from which popular culture has derived many of its notions about the subject, does the larger-than-life topic proud. The author retraces the steps of legendary Great White Explorer Percy Fawcett (allegedly an inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger), who, accompanied only by his son and the younger Fawcett’s best friend, set out to find evidence of a great civilization in the Amazonian jungle.

The members of the expedition never returned — nor, apparently, did many other adventurers who sought glory by attempting to discover both Fawcett’s fate and the object of his quest. Grann concludes this mesmerizing tale with a wry realization about the expedition’s goal that’s just too good for any but the most adept Hollywood treatment.

3. How to Debunk a Myth with an Even More Compelling Story

Book: Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Nathaniel Philbrick)

Philbrick peels away the facile fiction about Thanksgiving by booking readers passage on a sorely overcrowded one-hundred-foot-long sailing ship with a hundred passengers and more than two dozen crew members and integrating these additional travelers, through commanding scholarship and vivid writing, into the historic settlement the colonists formed against all odds. The story of their harrowing, heartbreaking first winter and their fumbling attempts to get along with their native neighbors, and an accurate account of their day(s) of thanks, stripped of schoolbook holiday hoo-haw, is refreshing.

This account is framed by details about what led a band of religious dissidents and assorted “Strangers” (split about evenly in numbers) to unite in this venture, and by chapters chronicling the tragic misunderstandings and missteps that led to war between their descendants and their erstwhile indigenous allies. Tied together seamlessly, these episodes describe in a nutshell the story of the United States.

4. How to Make Being a Dork Seem (Momentarily) Cool

Book: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Joshua Foer)

Foer, the brother of the editor of the New Republic and of novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, holds his own against the literary accomplishments of his older siblings with this absorbing account of how he immersed himself in the highly esoteric world of memory masters and — well, I won’t spoil it for you. Chancing on information about people who demonstrate prodigious memorization skills in competitions they train for with the intensity of Olympic athletes, Foer decides to try it out for himself, and takes us along for the ride.

Along the way, we meet the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, as well as purported savant Daniel Tammet, whose memorization wizardry Tammet himself (perhaps disingenuously) attributes to autism, in addition to various mental athletes who seem to be exactly the type of poorly groomed, socially inept geeks you’d expect to find devoting much time and effort to a seemingly useless skill. But Foer also shares fascinating facts and history about memorization, and though he soon retires from his short career as a memory-competition participant, advocates the techniques he learned as tools any amateur will find beneficial in life.

Below you’ll find a compilation of the most visited posts we published in 2011. Make sure you haven’t missed any!

1. 100 Mostly Small But Expressive Interjections
2. 7 Grammatical Errors That Aren’t
3. 100 Beautiful and Ugly Words
4. 10 Latin Abbreviations You Might Be Using Incorrectly
5. 100 Whimsical Words
6. Should You Self-Publish?
7. 50 Problem Words and Phrases
8. 20 Classic Novels You Can Read in One Sitting
9. Who Cares About “Whom” Anymore?
10. How Spelling Diverges Between American and British English
11. 10 Words That Don’t Mean What You May Think They Do
12. 10 Comma Cases in Which More Is More
13. 10 Pairs of Similar-Looking Near Antonyms
14. 150 Foreign Expressions to Inspire You
15. Is “They” Acceptable as a Singular Pronoun?
16. 50 Redundant Phrases to Avoid
17. 10 Intensifiers You Should Really, Absolutely Avoid
18. The Other N-Words
19. 7 Editing Pet Peeves
20. 8 Steps to More Concise Writing

The United States is not among those countries with prose police, but our library and bookstore shelves groan with dictionaries and grammar, usage, and style manuals as well as handbooks that guide us in our use of punctuation — and the Internet abounds with more of the same. These resources are not necessarily engrossing reading (unless you’re a word nerd), but they are exemplary models in practicing what they preach, and they are likely to be much more reader-friendly than the dread-inducing language arts textbooks of our schooldays.

Why, then, has the quality of writing declined so dramatically that we might benefit from an English Academy — one devoted not to language purity (which words we use, and which ones we don’t) but to monitoring the written form of that language?

The democratization of publishing is primarily responsible, I think. Because, thanks to the dramatic increase in options for businesses and organizations to disseminate information by way of text online and in print, and because of the ease of self-publishing the same media affords anyone with access to them, more and more people who don’t pay attention to such details are writing and being read, which of course exposes so many more people to the errors.

Thus, erroneous usage — not just in hyphenation, punctuation, spelling, and other mechanical mistakes but also in infelicities of grammar, syntax, usage, and other more substantial elements of writing — is multiplied virally because of the shift in the signal-to-noise ration: Fewer people are reading rigorously written and edited prose, and more people are reading writing crafted with less care. This, I believe, is the culprit in the decline of quality in published writing I’ve observed over the years both as an editor and as someone who takes a busman’s holiday every time I read for information or pleasure.

The reason for the decrease in consumption of meticulously produced content is twofold. Fewer people actively seek good writing. But equally culpable are the publishing industries, the erstwhile guardians of good writing, which compromise the quality of periodicals and other publications because they discourage labor-intensive practices necessary for producing high-quality writing, practices inimical to lean-business strategies that result in high profits.

This issue brings up a question I’m surprised people don’t ask more often: In the realm of writing, if so many people do something seen as wrong or nonstandard, doesn’t that make it right? After all, that’s how new laws are written and how societal mores changes. And that’s how language changes. So, if the majority of writers write, “You and me” at the head of a sentence instead of “you and I” (or reverse their preferences when the phrase is the object of a sentence), why is the former usage considered incorrect and the latter one deemed the acceptable way? The majority seems to beg to differ.

Because language doesn’t turn on a dime. For sanity to prevail, there must be a period of time between shifts in rules of usage and punctuation and other elements of writing in which we respond to “Everybody else does it” the way a parent would react to that type of justification uttered by a willful teenager: “Well, if everybody else went and jumped off a cliff, would you?” By the same token, we need to scold writers by saying, “Well, if everybody uses comma splices, does that mean you should, too?”

At the risk of seeming like a strict parent, that’s why I’m going to defend my rigor by saying that popular usage is not a standard. It is not a guidebook. And I will follow my own counsel: I will adhere to the rules (unless I have an indefensible reason to break one now and then), and I will exhort others to do the same.

We’ll be adding new ones in the near future, so stay tuned.

Multiple Choice Tests

• Vocabulary Test 1
• Spelling Test 1
• Grammar Test 1
• Vocabulary Test 2

Quizzes

• Quiz About Emphasis
• Quiz About the Comma
• Quiz About Parallel Construction
• “Not only… but also” Quiz