Youth is Wasted on the Young

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Carrie. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hello, Carrie. Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

I am writing a short book for my boyfriend’s daughter, who is getting ready to start her freshman year at Indiana University.

So my book is basically things that I would tell my college self, and I was trying to think of creative things I could do to include other than just my bullet points.

So I wanted to use phrases and quotes. And one of those that came to mind is one that I heard several years ago, and it’s youth is wasted on the young.

So in order to use it in my book, I wanted to correctly attribute the author. And I have researched online, and I can’t find a definitive answer.

What did you find that wasn’t definitive?

Well, I’ve seen several different people. George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain. Hey, William Lincoln.

Lincoln, yeah. You’ve got to throw all the usual suspects in there. Biggie said it.

And I don’t even know what the exact quote is because it’s often written differently, too.

All right. You’ve actually got two questions here. One is, who said this first? And the other one is, in the future, where can I go to get definitive answers besides this show?

Oh, perfect. Yes, I have two questions.

Let’s answer both those questions. It was George Bernard Shaw who had the sentiment first. Notice I said the sentiment.

Because what tends to happen is somebody in a well-placed, kind of very visible public arena will say something, and then it kind of gets modified as it’s quoted and re-quoted.

It becomes better. People polish off the edges and shine it up and give it a better wording.

And frankly, youth is wasted on the young is perfect. You can’t really even take a word out of that.

Right.

What happened was in 1935, apparently he said this to an interviewer or in a conversation that was quoted.

And it appears like almost instantly in the kind of jokey section of a lot of newspapers around North America.

And many of them quote the Montreal Daily Star, where supposedly the conversation went like this.

A young woman remarked, what a wonderful thing is youth. And George Bernard Shaw apparently replied, yes, and what a crime to waste it on children.

Which in itself is a pretty nice repartee, right?

Yeah.

And so then it was immediately ensconced into famous quote books and showed up in joke books.

And it’s the kind of thing you would see in Reader’s Digest at the end of the column where they just needed to throw in a little line or two.

And it got modified over time and misattributed it as tends to happen with all the best quotes.

So in the future, if you’re looking for a definitive source, we recommend the Yale Book of Quotations by Fred Shapiro.

Fred took all the Bartlett’s books and all the quotation books that he could find, and he went through and he said, wow, that’s wrong. Let me fix that.

And he one by one got all these famous quotes, and he researched them individually and went to all these vast archives and said, okay, I’m going to change history because it turns out it wasn’t said by that person.

It wasn’t said by this person. It was said by this other person.

And so it’s a very reliable book. I think he may be working on a new edition.

So that’s the Yale Book of Quotations by Fred Shapiro.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful book, too. I would put it on your wish list.

Okay, wonderful. And his name is Fred Shapiro?

Fred Shapiro, yeah.

Okay, yeah.

Thank you, Carrie. I hope it turns out well. I hope she appreciates all the hard work you’ve put into it.

Thank you. Thank you so much for your help.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Well, we’d love to help you with your book. We’ve got all kinds of things to say. Opinions galore. 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.