One of our favorite new reference works is The New Yale Book of Quotations (Bookshop|Amazon) edited by Fred Shapiro, associate director for collections and access at the Yale Law Library. This volume is a vastly expanded version of the previous version, The Yale Book of Quotations (Bookshop|Amazon), published in 2006. In addition to adding notable quotes from the past 15 years, Shapiro also uncovered new evidence showing that many famous quotations were actually originated by women, but misattributed to more famous men. For example, although Winston Churchill is credited with coining the term Iron Curtain, the term was already being used by British political reformer Ethel Snowden. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “New Yale Book of Quotations”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Here’s a great quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
And he’s so right. When you find that perfectly phrased statement that expresses an idea so well, something just clicks into place and you want to share it with somebody else just the way it is.
In fact, that quote from Emerson is a perfect example.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
And I’m reminded of this again and again, paging through the new must-have reference work called The New Yale Book of Quotations, edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
And Fred Shapiro is Associate Director for Collections and Access at the Yale Law Library.
And in 2006, he published The Yale Book of Quotations.
Well, the new Yale Book of Quotations is vastly expanded. It has 12,000 quotations, and that’s a thousand more than the previous version 15 years ago. And one thing that makes it notable is the fact that again and again, Shapiro has found that many famous quotes were actually originated by women, but then misattributed to more famous men. For example, the term Iron Curtain is always attributed to Winston Churchill, but it turns out that the person who beat him to that was British activist and politician Bessie A. Stanley. And you know the quote, now I know why nobody ever comes here. It’s too crowded. Everybody associates that with Yogi Berra, but actually the first person to say that was Suzanne Ridgway, an actress who appeared in several Three Stooges movies.
So it’s a fascinating book for that alone, but it’s a book that I know I’m going to be returning to again and again and again.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the first edition, and I can’t believe it’s been 15 years since the first. And so I am glomming on to the second edition.
I’m a big fan of antedating. That’s where you find an earlier use of a quotation. And I appreciate the dedication to the craft of not only finding the exact version, but the approximate version of the quotation, because sometimes it varies a little bit. And that’s an important part of writing a quotation book, not just getting the word-for-word version, but the idea behind it and Fred Shapiro and the people who’ve helped him out. And he’s very grateful and gracious about acknowledging the help from the people who’ve contributed to this book so that when you dig into it, you get the sense that there are no new ideas under the sun, that it’s all been thought before.
I think somebody said that, Grant.
Yeah.
Nothing new under the sun.
Yeah.
And you kind of just want to shut up because you’re kind of like, oh, I’m pretty sure that any idea that’s come to my head, somebody else has said before, I’m not as smart as I thought I was.
But it’s a little encouraging as well to know that there’s this deep vein of humorous thought, for example, that has this rich tradition and you’re on the tail end of it, whipping along behind, holding onto the coattail after coattail of all these people who are smarter, better, quicker than you. It’s really kind of delightful. And I do appreciate his work to find all these women who said these things. And for example, he’s done a really smart thing in the book. For example, we might say that Ronald Reagan said some of these things, but Fred Shapiro attributes them to his copywriter, to his speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. And that’s the right thing to do. If you know who wrote a speech, then they’re the person who deserves the credit, not the person who said the words.
Yeah. And it’s super cool that we’re the beneficiaries of those last 15 years of research because we’ve got all these new quotes from, you know, people as diverse as Beyonce and politicians from today. But also we’re all the beneficiaries of the digitization of so many materials that Fred Shapiro didn’t have access to 15 years ago.
That’s exciting, too.
The book, again, is the new Yale Book of Quotations, edited by Fred R. Shapiro, and we both wholeheartedly recommend it.
Check it out.
And in the meantime, if you want to talk about language, call us, 877-929-9673.
