Birdsong

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Here's a great story from The New York Times on some clever words associated with and attributed to a great American, Maya Angelou, even though the 'birdsong' quote was written originally by the children's book author Joan Walsh Anglund.

Not that anyone minds too much, I suppose. 

The Wise Words of Maya Angelou. Or Someone, Anyway.

By ERIN McKEAN - The New York Times

THIS week the United States Postal Service celebrated the life and work of Maya Angelou, unveiling a stamp with her portrait and a lyrical quotation. Unfortunately, the words on the stamp do not appear to have originally been uttered by the poet. Instead, they come from the children’s book author Joan Walsh Anglund.

Ms. Anglund, 89, graciously called the misattribution of her epigram to Ms. Angelou “interesting.” The line, “A bird doesn’t sing because he has an answer, it sings because he has a song” appeared in her 1967 book of poems, “A Cup of Sun.” (The version on the stamp uses “it” instead of “he.”)

This is not an instance of plagiarism — it doesn’t seem that Ms. Angelou, who died last year, claimed the words as her own. It’s far more likely that the very appealing line struck a chord with the author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” who quoted it herself in many interviews. (The Postal Service noted that Ms. Angelou’s family approved the line for use on the stamp.) But the subsequent misattribution is a textbook example of a widespread phenomenon in the world of quotations.



The "Forever" stamp honoring Maya Angelou.Credit US Postal Service

The term was coined by the quotations expert (or gnomologist) Nigel Rees, who maintains the “Quote ... Unquote” newsletter and who broadcasts a quiz show of the same name on BBC Radio 4 in Britain. Essentially, Churchillian Drift is the process by which any particularly apt quotation is mistakenly attributed to a more famous person in the same field.

Britons tend to attribute anything vaguely political to Churchill (and before Churchill, Disraeli); Americans like to credit anything folksy to Mark Twain, and before Twain, Benjamin Franklin. In fact, “People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first” is a popular quotation apparently by a man named David H. Comins. A favorite Twainism-that-isn’t is “The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work,” which might be the work of a 1930s newspaper columnist named Stubby Currence, but is more likely a variation of an older, anonymous joke.

A metajoke on this subject shows a picture of the 16th president with the text “ ‘Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it’ — Abraham Lincoln.”

Ms. Anglund’s words are having a very public moment, and her response to seeing her work so conspicuously misattributed seems fairly mild. But once a quotation has drifted, there is really nothing to be done. I know. My own words have been subject to the same phenomenon, on a much smaller scale.

In 2006, I wrote, “Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female,’ ” on my blog. I chose an image of the fashion editor Diana Vreeland to illustrate the post because, in my opinion, she is the canonical example of someone who was stylish without being pretty. Very soon thereafter, the line began to be attributed to her.

If you search online for that phrase, a good chunk of the top links will credit Ms. Vreeland, after my original post and a very thorough post by a site called the Quote Investigator, which debunks the Vreeland attribution.

The wrongly attributed quote-and-image has been repinned thousands of times on Pinterest. On Facebook, the erroneous version has been shared by the actor Rose McGowan and the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, among others. There even appears to be at least one tattoo, luckily without any attribution at all.

The most surreal part of having one’s own words misattributed is dealing with the indignant people who come to the original blog post to accuse me of erroneously claiming those words as my own. It’s easy to see it from their point of view. After all, what’s more likely: that a line about prettiness you find quotable was said by one of the world’s foremost fashion editors, or by a nerdy lexicographer? (And besides, Diana Vreeland’s face is right there!) Churchillian Drift is about reinforcing expressions with the comforting bulwark of a familiar authority.

In a way, I find it flattering that my words have been attributed to Ms. Vreeland, whom I have always admired. It’s possible that, without the mistaken attribution and Ms. Vreeland’s bold face, my baker’s dozen of words would not be quoted across the Internet. Despite the misquotation, plenty of women have tracked me down to let me know my words have made a difference in their lives, which has certainly made a difference in mine.

Ruth Finnegan in “Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation,” includes a poetic description of quoting as “finding an echo, more beautifully or roundly expressed than we could ever manage ourselves, in the words of someone else.” And it seems that when we do find an apt expression, our resonance matters more than its provenance. We share a quotation because it reflects upon ourselves, and not because we necessarily want to amplify the voice of the original author.

Perhaps, to misquote another apothegm frequently misattributed to Ms. Angelou: “They may forget who said it — but they will never forget how it made them feel.”

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