Wednesday - July 22, 2009

Moon landings: That’s one small quotation for a man. . .

Christopher Howse writes about the world’s faiths, especially Christianity.
He also comments frequently and blogs on the uses and abuses of the English language.

Moon landings: That’s one small quotation for a man. . .
Following a claim that Neil Armstrong did not think up his famous phrase himself, Christopher Howse finds that no one said what you thought, and someone else said it first.

By Christopher Howse
Published: 6:12PM BST 21 Jul 2009

A retired engineer from Berkshire, Gary Peach, says that it was he who came up with the line, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong is on record as saying that he “thought about it after landing” on the Moon.

Shall we see the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations listing the remark under Mr Peach’s name in future? Even if we do, one can’t help thinking that it was the event that made the words famous, not their inherent brilliance. In any case, Mr Armstrong fluffed them.

Mr Peach says he wanted to avoid the lunarnauts going on about dust. If so, he was only partly successful. Shortly after his remark about stepping, Mr Armstrong observed: “It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal.” That has a poetic ring, as if it was by Hopkins or Eliot, and Mr Armstrong recalled it subliminally.

Sometimes, it seems as if nobody famous ever said quite what you thought they did, and even then someone else had said it first. “Let me remember some words of St Francis,” Margaret Thatcher said in Downing Street in 1979. “Where there is discord, may I bring harmony.” Many people now think she said, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love,” because that is the version of the prayer they know.

The words were put into Lady Thatcher’s mouth by Ronald Millar, her chief speechwriter. He probably thought the words had indeed first been uttered by St Francis of Assisi. In reality, they date back no earlier than 1912.

They appeared in a pious French magazine called La Clochette, published by a group founded in 1901 by Father Esther Bouquerel, who perhaps wrote them. They were fastened on St Francis after being printed on the back of a picture of him in 1920.

Famous names attract famous words as a sofa attracts cat hairs. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” said Voltaire, as any writer of letters to newspapers knows. He did not say it, though.

The words were first published in 1907 in a book by S G Tallentyre, or so the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says. But there was not even any such person as S G Tallentyre, for that was a mere pen-name used by a writer called Evelyn Beatrice Hall. No one ever writes: “In the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, ‘I disapprove of what you say...”

Perhaps the most electrostatic attractor of quotations is Churchill. Some of the things he really did say, though, had been said by others before. He coined the phrase Iron Curtain in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. If Ethel Snowden had used it in 1920, no one cares. It was even used by Goebbels, for heaven’s sake, in 1945, in a thoughtful leader in the magazine Das Reich. But when we hear the words Iron Curtain, we do not, fortunately, think of Goebbels.

As a magnetic furball, Oscar Wilde does pretty well, too. Though James McNeill Whistler did answer his remark, “I wish I’d said that,” with the riposte, “You will, Oscar, you will,” the story, by an irony, appeared not in a biography of Whistler, but in one of Wilde, – by L C Ingleby, or so the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says.

The biography came out in 1907, like the Voltaire book. Ingleby didn’t exist either, being a pen-name of Cyril Gull, a curate’s son better known as Guy Thorne. who made a habit of concealing bottles of whisky all over the countryside so that on a walk he was never more than a quarter of a mile from refreshment.

The moral is perhaps that famous people who do famous things should imitate stout Cortes when he stared at the Pacific, silent upon a peak in Darien. Except it wasn’t Darien. And it wasn’t Cortes.

TELEGRAPH

Posted by peiper     on 07/22/2009 at 06:16 AM   
Filed Under: • Education • Fun-Stuff • UK •  
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