‘Could You Personalize That?’
Should authors sign books?

At a book fair I once signed two books to “Tom.” Tom turned out to be “Rod.” Rod refused my offer to sign new books for him. With a malicious grin, Rod said he planned to show my bloopers to his friends as evidence of our close personal friendship.

As we left the fair, I asked Bobbie Ann Mason if she’d made any mistakes that day. She sure had, said the Kentucky novelist. The worst one was inscribing a book of hers to patrons of the Anderson County Pubic Library.

What is it that makes signing books such a powerful bomb waiting to explode at the slip of a pen? For the average author, “Would you sign my book?” is a loaded question. What should be an occasion of high honor becomes one of low apprehension. Compounding their anxiety is the added fillip, “Could you personalize it?” People who were strangers a few seconds earlier hope for something warm, intimate, personal. At the very least they’d like to get a unique sample of the author’s wit and erudition.

I never know what to write in these pressure-packed situations. It’s like being asked to offer a toast to someone you’ve just met. Can I get away with “Best regards”? Or raise the temperature a bit to “Warm regards”? Maybe a stock “personal” message will do, something related to the subject of the book. But suppose two book buyers compare inscriptions and nail my promiscuity? Oscar Wilde had to stop signing books “From a poet to a poem” when too many of those he’d flattered with this phrase discovered how many other readers Wilde also considered poems.

Book inscribers have two basic alternatives: write something rote, bland, and safe, like Elmore Leonard’s stock inscription “Take it easy.” Or they can try to “personalize” their scrawled message and risk spectacular failure. The many eager young women who asked Melissa Bank to write something “personal” in their copy of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing took home books inscribed “I feel so close to you right now.” Such whimsy can backfire, however. One frisky author wrote “We’ll always have Paris” in the book of a customer at Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore. The book buyer returned it. She’d never been to Paris, the woman explained, had no plans to go to Paris, and if she ever did go to Paris, it certainly wouldn’t be with that man. Tattered Cover gave her a fresh copy.

Are books with botched inscriptions returned very often? A Tattered Cover events coordinator told me she had a stack of them in her office.

A little sympathy for book signers might be in order. In some ways, signing a book is harder than writing a book. While writing books we can take as long as necessary to get our words right and revise them as often as a manuscript demands. None of this is true when signing them. Then we must write swiftly and spontaneously with no margin for error, no opportunity to edit or revise. Authors routinely wilt under the pressure. “For me the worst is when I start an inscription and midway through the sentence I have no idea where it’s going,” says biographer Eric Lax (Bogart). “What the hell am I trying to say here? I ask myself. How am I going to finish this sentence and pass myself off as a guy capable of writing a book?”

It could be that those who write books are temperamentally unsuited to signing them. In some ways scribbling words on flyleaves and title pages has more in common with running for office than writing books. Among other things it calls for an ability to recall the names of those one has just met and spell them accurately. This can be harder than it sounds. Novelist Robert Olen Butler says that when signing books for acquaintances who assume he remembers their name, he often blanks. Asking “Is this for you or for someone else?” will sometimes get him off the hook. Or, “I’ve never gotten the spelling of your name.” “ ‘B-o-b,’ you say? Oh, right.”

Another author told me about being hosted by a college classmate in a city where he was giving a reading. After dinner, the classmate and his wife handed their visitor three of his novels to sign. He blanked on the wife’s name. Before taking out his pen, the novelist asked to use their bathroom. There, he frantically searched the medicine cabinet for a bottle with her name on the label. After finding one, the author returned and signed his hosts’ books.

Sometimes I’ve mused about hiring an impersonator to sign books for me. Undoubtedly there is somebody out there who could do a better job than I do, someone with better handwriting and more empathy: a calligrapher, say, or a clergyman. Oscar Wilde had a friend sign copies of The Ballad of Reading Gaol for his publisher. This man’s signature was more handsome than his, Wilde explained. And besides, he was tired.

Ralph Keyes’s 16 books include Euphemania, The Courage to Write, and I Love It When You Talk Retro. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. For further information, see www.ralphkeyes.com.

When I was eight and my brother Gene was eleven, we walked to the Centre Daily Times‘s office every day after school.  On the way we’d pass through town, the Corner Restaurant, Murphy’s five and dime, and Rae & Derrick’s Drug Store where I bought red licorice and cherry ice cream sodas while listening to Eddie Fisher sing “I’m Walking Behind You” on the jukebox.  Across the street from Rae & Derrick’s was the Nittany Movie Theater where we watched Commando Cody, Gene Autry, and Bomba the Jungle Boy at Saturday’s kiddy show.  Admission cost us seventeen cents, a bag of popcorn a nickel.  Before entering the theater we’d stop at the Pero dairy store to get candy cigarettes, black licorice pipes, red wax lips or little wax milk bottles filled with a sip of sweet juice.

On my way to the newspaper office I’d sometimes get a Dixie Cup of ice cream at Pero’s.  Each lid of Dixie Cups had a picture of a movie star beneath a filmy piece of paper.  Once I got Keenan Wynn. Mom said Wynn was a relative of ours.  In his Dixie Cup picture Wynn had a mustache, held a pipe and looked sophisticated.

After arriving at the newspaper office, we’d sit on benches with the other paperboys in a cramped, stuffy office off the pressroom waiting for our papers to be printed.  This room was filled with the muffled clatter of the presses, the alluring smell of its ink and paper dust.  With a dramatic flourish the pressroom door would finally burst open and a first stack of papers would get banged down on the counter.  When it was my turn the supervisor counted out thirty copies and slapped them in my outstretched arms.  I’d ease these papers into my canvas sack, lift its strap over my shoulder, and start walking the several blocks to my customers.  As I walked I’d fold my papers into neat, tossable rectangles using a secret technique known only to paperboys. By the time I started tossing papers with a practiced backhand spin my fingers would be black with the ink of fresh print.

Since the Centre Daily Times had only eight pages most days, my frail shoulders could support the canvas paper bag.  But on Wednesday it swelled with ads to three times that size.  On Wednesdays I had to stop every block or two to rest.

Outside of town the houses grew larger, the lots bigger.  Most streets had arches of elm, maple and chestnut trees.  When their leaves fell, the air would be filled with a pungent blend of rotting and burning leaves.  Before their owners had raked them I’d kick leaves as I walked.  Sometimes I’d stoop to retrieve a horse chestnut in its spiky green shell.  Splitting this shell I’d remove the chestnut: a warm, luminous brown globe with a tan bullseye at one end.  After I resumed walking I’d massage this smooth ball of comfort in my pocket.

As the days shortened, I would glance longingly at warm families framed by lit windows.  One block of my customers were all fraternity houses.  On winter evenings I could smell the food being cooked in their kitchens.  Once when I stopped to collect the subscription fee from a frat, one of their members was being paddled on his backside as part of his hazing.

After all thirty of my papers were delivered I had one more block to walk home.  Home was a two story white frame house with green trim on East Foster Avenue.  Its front yard sloped gradually to the sidewalk which traversed huge elm trees guarding the street.  The back yard – surrounded by a white picket fence – had a picnic table and a glider hung from an apple tree. I spent hours climbing this tree, creeping slowly out on narrow branches to reach its red and green fruit. These apples were small, lumpy, and mottled with dark spots.  No apple I’ve eaten since has tasted better.  Their seductive smell grew closer as the branches grew thinner, bending under my 60 pounds.  It was a challenge to see I saw how far I could go before they snapped. Thankfully, none ever did.

My favorite room in our house was the basement.  Its musty darkness spelled intrigue to me. The basement was intriguingly stale, lightly mildewed.  Gene and I sometimes played in the coal bin, pretending its shiny black rocks were precious jewels.  I liked the smooth, cool feel of coal against my skin, its dust in my hair.  Above us we could hear the clatter of dishes being washed by our mother as she listened to “Queen for a Day” and “Truth or Consequences” on the radio.

I loved State College.  Titter if you like, but to me this town was Happy Valley.  Even though I’ve only been back a couple of times since we left nearly six decades ago, in some deep, warm recess of my soul, State College, Pennsylvania is still home to me.

OOOPS Dept.

NAMES IN VAIN

The New Yorker, February 27, 2012

Last month, François Hollande, the Socialist candidate for the French Presidency, launched his campaign in the Paris suburb of Le Bourget, vowing before fifteen thousand supporters that he would “change the destiny of our country.” Hollande has the reputation of being a sallow technocrat, so it was perhaps in an effort to ennoble his persona that, toward the end of the speech, punching the air for emphasis, he invoked someone better known for eloquence. “I will now quote Shakespeare, who reminded us of this universal truth: ‘They failed because they did not start with a dream.’” Hollande said. Unfortunately, the passage that had so moved him, or his speechwriters, was from “The Vision of Elena Silves,” a 1989 novel about a Peruvian Maoist revolutionary, by Nicholas Shakespeare, the Telegraph’s chief book reviewer.

Elvis Presley was also a little vague on Shakespeare—“You know, someone said that the world’s a stage and each must play a part”—but politicians, who turn to the aperçus of others as a shortcut to fluency, are probably the world’s premier manglers of the Bard, and of everyone else. When, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, then-Senator Joe Biden identified Shakespeare as the author of the phrase “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” his colleague Alan Simpson pointed out that the passage (slightly garbled) came from William Congreve’s play “The Mourning Bride.” “Why Shakespeare?” Marjorie Garber writes, in “Profiling Shakespeare.” “Well, for one thing, Shakespeare is ‘safe’: neither too high nor too low, He is . . . the abiding, ventriloquized voice of us all, of disembodied wisdom.” But back to Elvis. “Before we get started, let’s all say ‘Happy Birthday’ to Elvis Presley today,” Michele Bachmann said, on August 16^th, which was actually the day that Elvis died. Two months earlier, Bachmann had said, in Waterloo, Iowa, where she grew up: “What I want them to know is, just like John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa, that’s the kind of spirit I have, too.” Wayne’s parents lived in Waterloo for a time, before moving to Winterset, Iowa, where he was born, but Waterloo was the home town of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Presidential candidates, possessed of more abundant airtime, perhaps, than ideas with which to fill it, are the Dorothy Parkers of misquotation and misattribution. Remember Sarah Palin, and her notion that Paul Revere had warned the British that they weren’t going to take away our firearms? In New Hampshire, Mitt Romney—who once riled a crowd of Cuban-Americans by invoking, in positive terms, Castro’s slogan “Patria o muerte, venceremos”—declared, “Winston Churchill said, ‘When the facts change, I change, too, Madam.’” Only, it was John Maynard Keynes, the economist not much beloved of Republicans, who is commonly thought to have said it, and he said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sit?” (Scholars have recently suggested that the attribution to Keynes is apocryphal/) According to Ralph Keyes, the author of  “‘Nice Guys Finish Seventh’: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations,” Romney, with Keynes, committed a double whammy of misquotation, by “putting the wrong words in the wrong mouth.” (The only worse sin is that of Charles Barkley, who once complained that he’d been misquoted in his autobiography.) It was Biden, again, who told Katie Couric, in 2008, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened,’” Problem was, Herbert Hoover was President in 1929, and barely anyone had a TV.

Keyes, the quotation expert, said, “I’m not a Gingrich man, but he’s one of the few politicians I can take my hat off to.” Gingrich, he explained, diligently remembers the words “tends to” when quoting Lord Acton’s oft-abridged dictum on power. (Properly, it’s “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”) “It’s pretty impressive,” Keyes said. Dick Williams wrote, in his 1995 political biography, “Newt!,” that since high school Gingrich has been jotting down quotes on scraps of paper, which now fill dozens of shoeboxes. Had Gingrich heeded Ralph Waldo Emerson on generosity—“The only gift is a portion of thyself”—he might have been inclined to share his hoard with Herman Cain. At a Republican debate in Ames, Iowa, Cain declared, “A poet once said, ‘Life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line.’” The verses were actually from the theme song from “Pokémon: The Movie 2000.” That is not Nicholas Pokémon.

Lauren Collins

by Carolyn Howard-Johnson  •  Jan. 30, 2012 (originally reviewed for MyShelf.com)

If you don’t love language, it’s a good bet you aren’t a writer. But if you’re a writer, reading more about language (linguistics (?)) may not be high on your list of priorities. It’s so integral to the way you think, you believe you don’t need it.

I believe that Euphemania by Ralph Keyes will change your mind. Written with humor (because euphemisms are just naturally funny?) this book will certainly entertain. If you’ve ever wondered about the intricacies of our euphemisms—the origins as an example—this is the book for you. But who would have guessed that it also might be the perfect book to hone the skills of writers of dialogue and humor?

Academic writers?Use it as a quick-study on how to write a book that will sell to a wide market. The secret?Voice. Humor. Colloquialisms. Yep, and euphemisms. A book does not have to have the lack of moisture content (dry!) of a text book to be a textbook.I know about academic expectations. My daughter is a Ph.D. candidate. She explains it to me all the time. Having said that, if you’d like to actually sell something rather than giving everything away to unappreciative academic journals, try rewriting your brilliant theory for the general public!

Anthropologists and linguists will love this book, too. But mostly, it’s just fun learning why we use asterisks for words like sh*t and the euphemisms like the f-word. It’s also tons of fun to identify phrases we’ve stopped thinking of as euphemisms (love handles, anyone?), just because they are so part of our everyday language.

If I were rating this book for an Amazon review, it would give it a true (not a fake) five-star rating. For usefulness. For fun. For the love of language.

by Mark H. Teeter at 17/10/2011

At the end of the movie Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler leaves his mercurial wife Scarlett with perhaps the most memorable line in the history of cinema. To the entreaties “Where shall I go? What shall I do?”, the dashing Captain Butler simply replies, “Frankly, my dear, my indifference is boundless.”

What, that’s not the way you remember it? How about “Frankly, my dear, it is of no consequence”? Or “It’s all the same to me”? Or “I don’t give a hoot”? All of these euphemisms were suggested by the MGM studio to get around the proscribed word “damn,” whose use had disturbed the Hollywood censors of 1939 to the point of threatening the film’s release.

Happily, the Production Code monitors eventually relented and Butler’s “damn” entered movie history – and rightly so, as the word bears just the level of severity and finality needed to make the line work. “Boundless indifference”? – are you kidding?

This hoot of a story is one of hundreds offered up by Ralph Keyes in “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms” (New York: Little Brown, 2010). Russians learning English would do well to spend some time with this volume, as euphemisms are an important part of the language – and one of the most difficult to keep track of, damn it.

Everybody does it

Deriving from the ancient Greek for “good speaking,” euphemism today represents the substitution of a “mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt” – or simply “makes us uneasy,” as Keyes sums it up. The oldest recorded euphemism reflects this unease: the word “bear” appeared so that medieval Europeans could talk about the creature without naming it – which might summon the “bear” itself!

Every modern language keeps a stable of euphemisms. Russians are no slouches, ranging from the simple pancake блин (blin) – used to replace obscenities beginning with the same initial letters, just as Anglophones use “fudge” and “shucks” – and extending to the more chilling practice of re-labeling mass imprisonment and murder as “repressions” and “purges.” English gave the world “concentration camp,” of course, and may have become the global euphemizing leader over recent decades as it has split into more than a dozen nationand culture-specific Englishes that create euphemisms all their own.

In other words

“Euphemania” cites a large number of the euphemisms in broad use today in the United States, where an obsession with euphemizing has long been noted by visitors. The tendency derives, goes one theory, from the novelty of American democracy itself.

Whatever the reason, this tendency toward “more polite” or “politically correct” substitution has long posed problems for acquirers of US English, as “which words needed to be avoided and which ones were appropriate wasn’t always clear” – and isn’t now. Just as a 19th century English aristocrat could be chastised, to his astonishment, for saying “leg” instead of “limb” in the presence of American women, so a visitor today may be bewildered to find that non-white Americans should emphatically not be referred to as “colored people” – yet “people of color” works just fine, thanks.

The rapidity with which euphemisms change in the US lexicon suggests a “carousel whirl in which words are both soiled and cleansed”: some go mainstream – as Butler’s “damn” has – while others, termed “fallen euphemisms,” become as scandalous as the words they replace. Of the latter, a surprising example (to Prof. Extreme anyway) was “fart,” formerly a medical euphemism which “over time took on the odor of the act it referred to and itself became offensive.” One acceptable alternative – “to break wind” – should not be confused with the light outdoor jacket commonly called a “windbreaker.”

Don’t panic

The sheer volume and maze-like evolution of English euphemisms may seem daunting – and for good reason – but recall two things: first, Anglophones are aware of their euph-obsession and will normally make allowances for the non-native speaker who inadvertently lets out a “fart” in the wrong linguistic company.

And secondly, native speakers themselves are caught often enough using the wrong euphemism – or, even worse, creating a new one. When North Carolina governor Mark Sanford initially tried to disguise a prolonged absence spent visiting his mistress in Argentina as “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” his political career was over. And the country suddenly had a new generation of “hikers”!

A century ago, composer Max Reger wrote a critic after a very negative review, “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.” There is room, in other words, for considerable wit in this substitution game – and surely that’s reason enough for native speakers and English learners alike, when contemplating their choice of euphemisms, to give a damn.

Extreme Extra Credit: Last time: The advice that “short words are the best, and the old words best of all” was offered by Nobel literature laureate Winston Churchill – congrats to Dasha Loseva of Moscow for the first correct ID. Today: When an American party guest asks a host, “Where is your euphemism?” – what is the real question?

Mark H. Teeter is an American English teacher and translator

Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms
by Ralph Keyes

“I prefer not to say we are killing other people,” an American artillery captain said during the Gulf War. ‘I prefer to say we are ‘servicing the target.’”

Ah yes, servicing the target. Once you’ve read Ralph Keyes’—at first kind of cutesy, then rapidly increasing in intensity—little book on euphemisms, you might think servicing the target could range in meaning from dropping some big dogs to playing hide the poker to something more blunt, say, taking revenge on a co-worker or terrible boss in some unmentionable way.

Speaking of unmentionables, that’s the whole point of his book Euphemania. What we can’t mention, like bodily functions, er, I mean urinating and defecating, or rather peeing and pooping, or certain other bodily functions like, say, sex—or politically problematic unmentionables, like killing, or maybe even murdering, hundreds of civilians in a bloody and unclear war—that’s what Keyes writes about in this piece that surveys the euphemistic ground and ends up with the theory that humans might desperately need euphemisms in order to converse.

After all, where’s the joy in marking insider/outsider status if, say, a sixth-grade girl can’t say to her female friends that “Cousin Freddie’s here for a visit again” without having the boys in her class suddenly squealing “Period panties!” and running away. (A boy in my seventh grade class who would humiliate the girls by coming up to us, sniffing hard and then declaring, “I can smell who’s on the rag!” May he rot in h-e-double-hockey-sticks.)
Keyes’ compilation sometimes feels just like that—a list of euphemisms. But he weaves a narrative through the book, which starts with what our ancestors considered unmentionable: The name(s) of God(s) or other powerful spirits (Yahweh, “the kindly ones,” “He Who Must Not Be Named”). He talks about food and drink (“Rocky Mountain oysters”); death (“a fatal event”); body parts (“the king’s highway”—which euphemism for vagina, I must say, gives me an entirely different view of the book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell); work and the economy (the best euphemism for being laid off is not in this book, but in Jonathan Ferris’ Then We Came to the End: “Tom was walked Spanish down the hall”); hunting (“population management”); and much more.

He speaks of class and its ramifications on euphemizing—there’s a particularly fun section on the lords of King Charles II’s court and their extremely raunchy poetry—and of the ways that euphemisms (say, about how well stocks might perform, or about the possibility that someone with no job or income should ever be given a mortgage) affect the way we all live.

In short, the book makes for pleasant reading. It’s not too deep; it’s often funny and sometimes infuriating (“To the Pentagon, soldiers who were KIA became combat ineffective”—it’s like reading The Forever War, except it’s real); and it’s always enjoyable if never too intellectually challenging. Is it a great “bathroom read”? I’d answer in the affirmative.

Ralph Keyes will be speaking at the Eugene Public Library for Banned Books Week, September 25, 2011, at 2:00 p.m.

The shady art of the euphemism has been used to veil body parts and deceive investors

By Diane Dietz

The Register-Guard

Published: Monday, Sep 26, 201

When the stock market takes a tumble, as it does on a regular basis these days, the experts on Wall Street call it a “correction.”

The word sounds as benign as what a second-grade teacher does to a student’s homework, said Ralph Keyes, author of “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms.”

The term “market correction” doesn’t hint that millions have lost money that they expected to see them through retirement — most especially in fall 2008, when the market lost 18 percent of its value in a single week.

“Collapsing,” Keyes said. “The market is not correcting; it’s collapsing.”

But euphemisms such as “market correction” are what people use in the place of scarier words, Keyes said Sunday in a speech at the Eugene Public Library held in honor of Banned Book Week.

“Think of them as comfort words,” he said. “We use these euphemisms in place of terms that make us uneasy.

“What makes us uneasy changes with time.”

The euphemisms of any era will indicate what people of that time were most concerned about, he said. In the past, euphemisms for body parts and body functions were rife.

Winston Churchill was at a dinner party in Virginia, for example, where the hostess asked what part of the chicken he would care to eat.

Churchill asked for some “breast,” Keyes recounted.

A woman sitting next to him reprimanded the British prime minister for using such an offensive term, saying that what he should have asked for was “white meat.”

“The next day Churchill sent this woman a corsage with the message: ‘Pin this on your white meat,’” Keyes said.

In the days of ancient Rome, the word for the male sex organ was so shocking that citizens used the euphemism “penis,” a word from Latin that meant “small tail,” according to Keyes’ book.

In the centuries since, penis became the risque word that inspired a whole lexicon of euphemisms.

But as the world changes, so do the euphemisms. Today, economics has spawned a fresh run of euphemisms.

Nobody has problems anymore — they have “issues,” Keyes said.

“Toward the end of his term in office, George W. Bush said the economy was having some issues. Boy, did it ever,” Keyes said.

At its start, pundits referred to the recession as a “softening,” he said.

“When the stock market began to plummet, it was called an ‘eq­uity retreat,’ ” he said.

Financiers used the word “subprime” to describe a bad loan.

The worldwide financial problems were caused in part by people who borrowed against their homes or took out second mortgages.

That sounds bad, Keyes said, so bankers called it “accessing home equity” or putting your “assets to work.”

“It sounds like discovering diamonds in your backyard, and was treated this way by millions of homeowners and bankers offering loans to help them ‘leverage their assets,’ ” he said.

“When these loans were sliced up like so much salami and bundled into ‘collateralized debt obligations,’ they were said to be ‘securitized.’

“This has a reassuring sound. Something that’s securitized is secure, right? Wrong.”

Keyes said it’s not a stretch to suggest that euphemistic language helped the financial shenanigans of recent years to go on undetected.

“Tortured, euphemistic prose doesn’t just conceal problems,” he said. “It promotes the sort of muddled, evasive thinking that led to those problems in the first place.”

Community leaders will read out loud from banned books in an annual celebration of freedom of speech. Springfield Mayor Christine Lundberg is expected to turn the first page.

When and where: 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Springfield Public Library, 225 Fifth St.

The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Friday, July 22, 2011

I love quotations in general. I collect musings of the great minds like some people collect stamps. My notebooks are full of scrawled quotations and attributions. The short, pithy encapsulation of a truth impresses me greatly. After all, William Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

My admiration comes from envy. A talent for pithiness truly impresses me because I have to struggle with it. As a writer, I have a weakness for wordiness and must edit constantly. No matter how many useless words I cut, I never feel I’ve achieved the tightest writing. Therefore, I admire a writer who can say what he means in short, memorable phrases.

However, I’ve noticed over the years that many famous sayings are not quite what they seem. Sometimes the quotation that is familiar to us is not exactly what the person said. Even worse, sometimes the person to whom the quotation is attributed often is not the person who originally said it.

A famous example of this trait is “Truth is stranger than fiction.” I heard it repeated for years without knowing who said it. No one ever is given credit for this line; it has assumed the authority of a proverb. In fact, it comes from the poet Lord Byron, who wrote, “for truth is always strange; / Stranger than fiction: if it could be told.” Not quite the familiar quotation.

Many sources of quotations err when they attribute a saying — not only the Internet, but trusted reference books as well. I’ve often been frustrated trying to track down a quotation and its source. Luckily, the proper tool has arrived: “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When,” by Ralph Keyes. This excellent book now graces the go-to shelf on my desk — the reference books that are essential aids to writing. The book has the added virtue of being delightfully, gracefully and deftly written, making it a pleasure to read — a rarity for a reference book.

In the introduction to his book, Keyes explains the process by which quotations like Byron’s original become familiar adages. He calls the process “bumper-sticking” and explains, “Quotations that start out too long, too clumsy and too inharmonious end up shorter, more graceful and more melodious in the retelling.” That’s certainly true in Byron’s case.

Keyes also points out “flypaper figures” — famous people who are often attributed with lines that are not their own.

Most often, the quotation comes from a lesser-known figure. The most famous example is President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most quoted line: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” According to Keyes, this line has a long history, and Roosevelt seems to have drawn his version of the quote from Henry David Thoreau, who said, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”

However, a version of the quotation originated with Michel Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist: “The thing of which I have most fear is fear.” Francis Bacon, an English near-contemporary of Montaigne’s, wrote, “Nothing is terrible except fear itself.” The final “verdict” of Keyes on this quotation is “Credit the thought to Montaigne, its improvement to Bacon and the final version to FDR, with help from Thoreau.”

Keyes notes several flypaper figures, including Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. Twain is particularly sticky when it comes to quotes; almost any funny remark from the 19th century is attributed to him. Similarly, George Carlin is becoming the humorous flypaper figure of the 20th century, with all kinds of jokes he never told attributed to him.

One of Keyes’ flypaper figures is Dorothy Parker, the early 20th-century American writer, who always has been a favorite of mine. Her sarcastic and acerbic witticisms are legendary.

One famous “Parkerism,” which Keyes confirms she actually said, is a play on the Shakespeare line quoted above. While captioning an “underwear layout” in Vogue magazine, she expressed the idea that the season’s lingerie was skimpier than usual. Although her original line is longer, I prefer the bumper-stickered version: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Much wittier.

Keyes writes that Parker’s tendency to be misattributed started during her life, with the playwright George S. Kaufman complaining that “Everything I’ve ever said is attributed to Dorothy Parker.” To her credit, Parker “herself disavowed authorship of most of the witticisms that were routinely put in her mouth.”

Truth be told, I’ve misquoted famous figures all my life without knowing it. The value of Keyes’ book is that it shows the great extent of misquotations and misattributions. I’m now very suspicious of any quote I hear.

This problem might not be a problem, though. After all, Aristotle said, “History is what happened; literature is what should have happened.” By extension, history is what was said, and literature is what should have been said.

Come to think of it, I wrote that quote down from a lecture many years ago and never have actually seen it in anything I’ve read by Aristotle. Hmmm.

Doesn’t matter. It’s great literature.

As Ralph Keyes notes in his book Euphemania, “Euphemisms can have a bright side and a dark side.” They can be a source of evasion, a way to avoid topics that should be confronted, a way of choosing not to face unpleasant truths. At worst, euphemisms are employed by politicians, bureaucrats, merchants, and others as tools of manipulation. Ronald Reagan, for example, renamed the multiwarhead MX missile, capable of destroying multiple major cities and killing tens, or even hundreds, of millions of civilians – Peacekeeper.

When used judiciously, however, euphemisms can civilize discourse and be a welcome source of courtesy in rough times. At their best they can be creative verbal fresheners that make it easier to discuss touchy subjects. In his book Nigger Dick Gregory uses a taboo word to make us focus on its wide and often thoughtless use in our society. Playwright Eve Ensler does much the same thing in Vagina Monologues.

In Euphemania, Keyes traces the evolution of euphemisms about sex, excretions, disease, food, and many other subjects in great detail. The story of how – and why – these changes have occurred is interesting in itself, as well as being a tribute to his scholarship.

The word “bear“ is an interesting example. It‘s the oldest known euphemism, first recorded a thousand years ago, that means “the brown one.” Bears are so terrifying that early northern Europeans referred to them by substitute names, for fear that uttering their real name might beckon these ferocious beasts. Instead, the animals were referred to as “the honey eater” or “the licker.”

This tactic of not calling something terrible by its actual name, lest this bring it forth, was used often. In one of his novels, Stendhal depicts a mother who refuses to call her tubercular son’s illness by its actual name for fear that doing so might hasten his death. Tuberculosis was, of course, the major fatal disease of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. .

Similarly, Emily Dickenson’s biographer concluded that the poet was a closet epileptic, who could only refer to that affliction obliquely. During Dickenson’s mid-nineteenth century era epilepsy was considered shameful for men to have and unmentionable, literally, for women.

More recently cancer has been treated in the same way, as I know from my own experience. My mother always whispered the word, as if saying it out loud would bring on the affliction.

Keyes, always aware of the political and ethnic implications of euphemisms, illustrates also describes the many diseases named after ethnic groups. Thus English speakers called syphilis “Spanish pox.” After French soldiers who besieged Naples in the fifteenth century brought the disease back to France it became known as the Neapolitan disease. Italians preferred French malady, Poles called it German disease, Russians opted for Polish disease, Turks termed it Christian disease. The Japanese called syphilis Portuguese disease while the Portuguese called it Castilian disease. The English, Dutch, Greek, Arabs, and “Hebrews” came in for similar treatment in other contests. With this background it’s little wonder that European history is often a tale of war after war.

The marketplace is a rich, if often misleading, source of euphemisms, some rather dated, some quite new. In the dated but amusing category, Lifebuoy Health Soap had warned consumers about the dangers of body odor, or BO. The presence of BO in thirteen key areas of the body stood between them and social success. Eradicating BO with Lifebuoy “can help you win friends wherever you go” read one ad. The soap’s advertising campaign goes on to describe relationships saved, leading to eventual marriage. One ad even describes a crash with a truck that had been avoided; Lifebuoy playing an important role in preventing this tragedy.

Language manipulation is rampant in the marketplace. For example the word “used,” as in used merchandise, was itself a euphemism for secondhand.. Now it’s been replaced by pre-owned or, better yet, vintage. In a similar vein one airline installed stationary seats on its airplanes and called them pre-reclined. What once were called “junk stores” became thrift shops, then resale stores. And a leading purveyor of coffee calls its smallest cup “tall.”

The government sometimes colludes in this misleading gibberish. With the approval of the US Department of Agriculture, a certain amount of Mechanically Separated Meat –  a slurry of marginal meat such as tendons, bone marrow, and a permitted amount of bone bits, can be included in hot dogs.

Today a new group of terms, or in some cases old ones with new scope, affect our thinking. Among them are national security, climate change, urban, perhaps class (middle, working, and otherwise). These terms illustrate the stress that Keyes puts on the need for care in using words.

from STD and Herpes Pain Relief, Natural, Holistic and OTC Information

June 27, 2011

June 16, 2011

Reviewed: Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, by Ralph Keyes. New York. Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

As Ralph Keyes notes in his book Euphemania, “Euphemisms can have a bright side and a dark side.” They can be a source of evasion, a way to avoid topics that should be confronted, a way of choosing not to face unpleasant truths. At worst, euphemisms are employed by politicians, bureaucrats, merchants, and others as tools of manipulation. Ronald Reagan, for example, renamed the multiwarhead MX missile, capable of destroying multiple major cities and killing tens, or even hundreds, of millions of civilians – Peacekeeper.

When used judiciously, however, euphemisms can civilize discourse and be a welcome source of courtesy in rough times. At their best they can be creative verbal fresheners that make it easier to discuss touchy subjects. In his book Nigger Dick Gregory uses a taboo word to make us focus on its wide and often thoughtless use in our society. Playwright Eve Ensler does much the same thing in Vagina Monologues.

In Euphemania, Keyes traces the evolution of euphemisms about sex, excretions, disease, food, and many other subjects in great detail. The story of how – and why – these changes have occurred is interesting in itself, as well as being a tribute to his scholarship.

The word “bear“ is an interesting example. It‘s the oldest known euphemism, first recorded a thousand years ago, that means “the brown one.” Bears are so terrifying that early northern Europeans referred to them by substitute names, for fear that uttering their real name might beckon these ferocious beasts. Instead, the animals were referred to as “the honey eater” or “the licker.”

This tactic of not calling something terrible by its actual name, lest this bring it forth, was used often. In one of his novels, Stendhal depicts a mother who refuses to call her tubercular son’s illness by its actual name for fear that doing so might hasten his death. Tuberculosis was, of course, the major fatal disease of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. .

Similarly, Emily Dickenson’s biographer concluded that the poet was a closet epileptic, who could only refer to that affliction obliquely. During Dickenson’s mid-nineteenth century era epilepsy was considered shameful for men to have and unmentionable, literally, for women.

More recently cancer has been treated in the same way, as I know from my own experience. My mother always whispered the word, as if saying it out loud would bring on the affliction.

Keyes, always aware of the political and ethnic implications of euphemisms, illustrates also describes the many diseases named after ethnic groups. Thus English speakers called syphilis “Spanish pox.” After French soldiers who besieged Naples in the fifteenth century brought the disease back to France it became known as the Neapolitan disease. Italians preferred French malady, Poles called it German disease, Russians opted for Polish disease, Turks termed it Christian disease. The Japanese called syphilis Portuguese disease while the Portuguese called it Castilian disease. The English, Dutch, Greek, Arabs, and “Hebrews” came in for similar treatment in other contests. With this background it’s little wonder that European history is often a tale of war after war.

The marketplace is a rich, if often misleading, source of euphemisms, some rather dated, some quite new. In the dated but amusing category, Lifebuoy Health Soap had warned consumers about the dangers of body odor, or BO. The presence of BO in thirteen key areas of the body stood between them and social success. Eradicating BO with Lifebuoy “can help you win friends wherever you go” read one ad. The soap’s advertising campaign goes on to describe relationships saved, leading to eventual marriage. One ad even describes a crash with a truck that had been avoided; Lifebuoy playing an important role in preventing this tragedy.

Language manipulation is rampant in the marketplace. For example the word “used,” as in used merchandise, was itself a euphemism for secondhand.. Now it’s been replaced by pre-owned or, better yet, vintage. In a similar vein one airline installed stationary seats on its airplanes and called them pre-reclined. What once were called “junk stores” became thrift shops, then resale stores. And a leading purveyor of coffee calls its smallest cup “tall.”

The government sometimes colludes in this misleading gibberish. With the approval of the US Department of Agriculture, a certain amount of Mechanically Separated Meat –  a slurry of marginal meat such as tendons, bone marrow, and a permitted amount of bone bits, can be included in hot dogs.

Today a new group of terms, or in some cases old ones with new scope, affect our thinking. Among them are national security, climate change, urban, perhaps class (middle, working, and otherwise). These terms illustrate the stress that Keyes puts on the need for care in using words.

Reviewed by: Al Huebner

June 16th, 2011

Ralph Keyes’ Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms (Little, Brown and Co., 2010) will delight anyone who loves words, their origins and the way that they reflect cultural intentions, subterfuges and biases. Keyes defines euphemisms as words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy: sexual activity, body parts and secretions, war and killing, money, physical and mental disabilities, even food (Rocky Mountain oysters, anyone?). And, of course, politicians employ them. Nevada’s own Senate Taxation Committee has now morphed into a Revenue Committee. Enjoy!

Selected by Jeanne Goodrich, executive director for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.

By Ralph Keyes (Little, Brown and Co., 279 pages, $24.99)

Ever ponder what makes a nacho chip “authentic” or “restaurant-style”? Or why it’s a “courtesy call” when the credit-card company tries to push something over the phone? Ralph Keyes explores such obfuscation when it comes to food, drunkenness, medicine, the military, money, sex, death and body parts. Heck, he even wonders why his first name became a slang stand-in verb for vomit. Keyes delves into the psychology and evolution of language-twisting, too, and points out that a polite paraphrase for one era is taboo for the next.

It’s perfect reading for marketing students, aspiring politicians and anyone wanting exhaustive and giggle-inducing lists (and origins) of alternate expressions for visiting the powder room or breaking wind.

The snicker factor aside, “Euphemania” is a fascinating and amazingly well researched little book. Serious word geeks shouldn’t pass it by.

HOLLY COLLIER WILLMARTH

COPY EDITOR

The impulse to find more refined ways to talking about unpleasant truths is a constant of the human experience; what changes over time are the topics deemed to need sugarcoating.

By Ruth Walker / April 19, 2011

When two different colleagues suggest I should pay attention to a book, I tend to take notice. The book in question is “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms,” by Ralph Keyes.

It is a lighthearted, easy read, but not without erudition.

Sex, disease, death, and body parts all loom large here – quelle surprise. But Keyes puts it all into a larger context. He quotes University of Chicago linguist Joseph Williams: “Euphemism is such a pervasive human phenomenon, so deeply woven into virtually every known culture, that one is tempted to claim that every human has been pre-programmed to find ways to talk about tabooed subjects.”

For prehistoric peoples who believed that to mention directly something they feared would tend to bring it forth, it made sense to refer to bears as “honey-eaters,” Keyes notes.

He goes into current brain research to explain, “Evidence … suggests that cursing may be a form of protolanguage that has more in common with a dog’s bark than, say, Plato’s Republic.” On the other hand, he says, “Evasive speech apparently originates in the newer parts of our brain where complex thought originates. While words that we utter spontaneously when provoked are more likely to emerge from the uncensored limbic brain, given an opportunity to ruminate we turn to the cortex and choose from among its vast supply of euphemisms. Since the brain and a capacity to speak have evolved jointly, it may even be that creating euphemisms contributed to our ability to think.”

It all makes me feel somewhat better about what Keyes calls “the euphemizing instinct.”

Euphemism comes from Greek words meaning “to speak with fair words, use words of good omen,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Eupheme was the name of “the ancient Greek female spirit of words of good omen, praise, acclaims, shouts of triumph, and applause,” according to Wikipedia.

“The words we use and those we avoid illustrate what we care about most deeply. Euphemisms are the press secretary of values,” Keyes says.

It’s in the realm of public policy that euphemism makes the most trouble today, Keyes suggests. And here it may be useful to distinguish between instinctive euphemism and strategic euphemism. “Global warming” has been knocked out of the box by “climate change,” for instance – a strategic euphemism that’s won bipartisan support.

Not long ago the financial sector was nearly brought down by its involvement in loans known as “subprime.” This ought to mean simply “below first rate.” But it really meant way below first rate, and a lot of people getting first-rate salaries should have been paying enough attention to stop it.

And speaking of the corporate sector, Keyes says, “The tortured prose in annual reports both conceals problems and promotes the muddled thinking that created those problems in the first place. By contrast, direct speech reflects clear thinking. The Ford Motor Company – whose then-CEO wrote in a 2002 annual report that the previous year’s results were ‘unacceptable’ – weathered the subsequent auto industry collapse far better than its mealymouthed competitors.”

It may be that euphemism is most helpful when it gets us talking about difficult subjects. But there comes a time when clear thinking and direct action are needed.

It took me longer to finish this book than the others.  Probably because it’s a nonfiction book that talks about euphemisms.  Since it wasn’t a story with a plot, I didn’t read it as consistently.

So, here is my first nonfiction read of the year…Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms by Ralph Keyes.

From the book flap:

Have you ever wondered why we use so many euphemisms?  In an age when liars  misspeak, couples engage in coital activity, and doctors say painful procedures “might pinch a little,” euphemistic talk abounds.  Did you ever inhale?  Enjoy a wee drop?  Hike the Appalachian Trail?

These are just some of the euphemisms Ralph Keyes writes about in Euphemania.  He shows in fascinating detail how our passion for tidying up language has evolved over time.  How yesterday’s “cow patty” became today’s biosolid, and our ancestors’ “smallest room” was replaced by today’s powder room.  With intriguing stories Keyes reveals why Louisa May Alcott’s family felt compelled to change their name from “Alcocke,” and how “Patagonian toothfish” became Chilean sea bass.

According to Keyes, euphemisms provide an accurate barometer of what makes us uneasy.  Was that talk of God?  Better we should say gad.  Did discussing breasts make us queasy? Try bosoms.   Our prudish Victorian forebears called trousers inexpressibles and toilet paprt curl paper.  To them a vulgar sneeze was a chaste nose spasm, and pregnancy an interesting condition.  We have other concerns.  Bad loans, for example, sound dire; nonperforming assets, not so much.  And why fire an employee who can just as easily be dehired.

Engaging, thoughtful, and brilliantly funny, Euphemania in a rollicking exploration of the surprising and inventive ways euphemisms are created and enter our language.

So, you may be asking, what is a euphemism?  Here is the author’s definition:

…words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy.

I also found the following definition at Dictionary.com:

An inoffensive word or phrase substituted for one considered offensive or hurtful, especially one concerned with religion, sex, death, or excreta.

When I originally started reading this book, I thought it was going to be more like a dictionary of euphemisms.  It does explain what a lot of euphemisms mean, but this book also explains how many of the things we say, and how we say them, came to be.  It also looks into some of the reasons we euphemize.

I didn’t realize how often we use euphemisms.  Since I started reading this book, I have been noticing them in my conversations with others, in advertising, on TV…all over.

We mostly euphemise to help everyone feel comfortable with the language we are using.

For example, would you rather I said “He farted as soon as he sat on his butt” or would “He floofered as soon as he sat on his bottom” be better?  Ok, not a great example, but you get the idea.  The second one sounds less offensive to me than the first one does because I replaced the offensive words with less offensive words.

It was interesting to learn what kinds of euphemisms were used a long time ago and how those have transformed into how we speak today.

The author mentioned how the use of euphemisms can make communication a lot harder, since we aren’t actually saying what we mean.  We kind of dance around our meaning and hope that the other person undertsands what we are saying.

I enjoyed this book and felt like I learned some new ideas.  If you are interested in euphemisms and their origins, I would recommend this book to you.

A word of warning…this book does contain swear words and sexual words in order to show how we euphemise them.  So, if this would bother you, then this isn’t the book for you.  I’m usually annoyed and bothered when there is bad language in a book that I’m reading, but since this book was about how we make offensive words less offensive, it didn’t bother me as much because I understood why they were included in the book.

People can get really creative when it comes to euphemizing.  Does your family use any unique euphemisms?

Anybody remember Jim Carrey’s movie Liar, Liar?  Remember when he told his son that sometimes grown-ups have to lie?  Well, this book is sort of an explanation for that statement.  It’s not so much that we have to tell untruths, but verbal and written communication can just be difficult without some way of softening things or coming at them obliquely.

This isn’t to say that all recourse to euphemism equals deception, of course.  Sometimes it’s done in an honest attempt to talk around a topic without saying anything offensive or to avoid being explicit (particularly when explaining morbid or embarrassing things to children).

Keyes takes in the history of this tendency to euphemize, starting from ancient times, through the extremely productive (euphemistically speaking, of course) Victorian era, and down to our current society that seems completely obsessed with euphemisms.

Right up front here, I have to point out that in discussing topics rife with euphemisms, the book of course discusses a bawdy issue or two and ventures into scatology not a few times.  But if you’re not squeamish or easily offended, I think you’ll find it as fascinating and hilarious as I did.

Mr. Keyes points out that we tend to go to a euphemism for whatever makes us nervous, afraid, or uncomfortable.  For early societies, this meant not referring to dangerous predators by name, or not naming the deities they feared.  For Victorians, this meant that someone wishing to order a breast, thigh, and leg of chicken needed to ask for “white meat, dark meat, and a drumstick.”  I find it hard to believe “leg” was ever considered offensive, but then again, I grew up in a house where saying “butt” or “fart” was forbidden.  (Either offense earned you a trip to the bathroom, which room is also euphemistically named, since while it’s true that bathing can be done there, you don’t “go to the bathroom” in the tub.  Unless you’re sleepwalking.  Trust me, I know.)

One of the interesting and tricky things about euphemisms is that you can never predict where they’ll come up.

Much as we might like to think that our modes of expression involve a straight trajectory of opening up, shedding inhibitions, and becoming more candid, that’s just not the case.  The terms and targets of our euphemizing have simply shifted.  An explosion of topics have become eligible for euphemistic discourse: not only the usual suspects of sex, body parts, and bodily secretions, but also money, diseases, and certain foods, to name just a few of the many subjects we euphemize today.

The chapters on sexuality and anatomy were quite amusing, the one covering excretions absolutely hysterical, but I really found the chapters on finance and politics quite intriguing.  It’s not market crash, it’s a “correction.”  It’s not an attack ad (that’s what the other side does), it’s a “contrast ad.”  Actually, it’s all mud-slinging.

The range of some of the euphemisms for certain categories is truly mind-boggling.  Mental Floss had an article not long ago about Ben Franklin’s 200+ euphemisms for “drunk.”  Think he might’ve tossed back a few in his time?  (The flossers also have a quiz titled “Monty Python Phrase or Ben Franklin Synonym for Drunk?”  And no, you can’t resist it.  Search your feelings; you know it to be true.)

If you aren’t noticing, I’m giving a thumbs-up to this book.  If you’re into language at all, you’ll love it.  It also looks like Keyes has a number of other extremely likely candidates for my To Be Read list.  But for now I shall resist.  I really must someday read one of the books I’ve actually purchased to read.

And now I have a couple of personal examples and then some philosophizing on the cycle of euphemisms.

When I was a kid, we had a family joke about sterilization procedures, whether performed on animals or humans.  It was all “back surgery” due to a surreptitious prayer request for a member (why did I use that word?) of our congregation.

Another example involved a former college roommate of The Fair Elaine, who got quite a kick out of a chemistry professor’s repeated use of the word “spigot” in a laboratory lecture.  Because in her family, the spigot was the distinctive anatomical feature of the human male.

This whole thing reminds me of one of those “real things said in court” emails:

Q: You were shot in the fracas?

A: No, I was shot midway between the fracas and the navel.

When I was a kid, you had to be very careful in my circle of friends to call your two-wheeled conveyance a “bicycle,” because “bike” had turned into our euphemism for the region of a boy’s anatomy typically covered by a protective device from Bike Sports Equipment.  Choruses of dumb laughter would erupt whenever any hapless outliers used the shortened word.  They just weren’t in the “in” crowd.

And here’s where the philosophizing comes in.  Think about the words “vulgar” and “profane.”  Look them up.  I’ll wait.  Okay, either you looked or you didn’t.  They both mean “common” (though profane is closer to unholy, but then holy means “set apart,” and “not set apart” could mean “common.”)  But the connotation of both of them is “something I’m too good for.”

So a word crops up and becomes the term “everyone” uses, making it vulgar.  The uppity folks among us then eschew its use in favor of some euphemism.  Eventually it, too, becomes part of the culture, and “everyone” is using it.  At which point the new word is vulgar.  And so we introduce a new new word and think it’s somehow better than the old one.  We also think that the old one is objectively objectionable.  And it isn’t.

(This is one reason I’m not really that offended by swearing, at least in certain contexts.  I don’t really mind if someone refers to manure in a different way than I do, and I’m not really concerned if someone says “damn” instead of “darn,” because they both express the same sentiment.  If they’re adding extra f-words to all their dialogue, however, I’m not a fan.  And I must say, I’m not at all a fan of OMG or its derivatives.  Though I’m willing to let “Oh my dawth” go for personal reasons.)

It’s also unfortunate that this euphemistic cycle deprives us of perfectly good words.  There are some people who really fit the description that C.S. Lewis would have labeled “an ass.”  But you might get a nasty look should you characterize them in this way during intercourse with your friends.  (Did that word shock you there?  Look it up.  It doesn’t have to refer to married-people-things.)

I’m getting to the bottom of my library pile, and I’m seriously toying with just returning one of the books I’ve started.  If all goes well, I should finish Bloody Crimes soon.  And then I’ll start on my purchased book backlog.

Oh, and check back for a Foney Friday post this week.  It’s gold, Jerry!  Gold!

Poultry presented all manner of verbal pitfalls at this time. “Cock” in particular posed serious problems. This word was short for “cockerel,” a male chicken. But “cock” was also short for “watercock,” the spigot of a barrel, leading it to become slang for “penis.” Unfortunately, that tainted term was embedded in many others. In the United States especially, previously innocent terms such as “cockeyed” and “cocksure” could no longer be used when both sexes were present. Under this regimen, “weathercocks” became weathervanes; “haycocks,” haystacks; and “apricocks,” apricots. Those burdened with last names such as “Hitchcock” and “Leacock” began to feel under siege. In response, an American family named “Alcocke” changed their name to Alcox. Fearing that this might not be adequate, before siring a daughter named Louisa May in 1832, Bronson Alcox became Bronson Alcott.

Love this book – I actually bought two – one for me and I sent one to my daughter. It is a really interesting and easy read that makes you think about where some of our language has come from.

Will pass it on to others when I’ve finished it.

Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

Ralph Keyes. Little, Brown, $24.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-316-05656-4

EUPHEMANIA: OUR LOVE AFFAIR WITH EUPHEMISMS explores the history, culture and literature of euphemisms, offering a lively discussion tracing the origins and changing usage of language. Politics, doublespeak and social commentary blend in a hilarious, pointed and fun literary and social assessment filled with examples and perfect for any general lending library.

Midwest Book Review

This is the first e-book that I ever read. Not that it’s relevant to the review of the book itself, but somehow it seems important to note following all of the physical books that I’ve reviewed on Amazon since 2001. I heard the author interviewed on the radio and the topic of how and all cultures substitute vague words and phrases for events and objects which are considered distasteful seemed like great material for a fun read. Over all, I was not disappointed. (As an aside, the e-reading experience didn’t completely win me over, but that’s a different review…)

Ralph Keyes guides the reader on a diverting tour of all sorts of euphemisms, from those used to describe bodily functions to those used to avoid giving offense to minority groups, as well as those we use to make ourselves a little more comfortable discussing things that feel just a little too personal. Euphemisms sanitize, deflect and skirt around topics that people of good taste lower their voices or close doors to discuss. And boy, there are more than enough common euphemisms out there to fill an entire book.

At first, I thought that there was a risk that the book might constrain itself to the scatological or the sexual (obvious targets for the subject) and, to be sure, he devotes considerable time to these topics, but he aims for a wider, more inclusive scope. While there’s a good bit of humor in “Euphemania,” it’s not all snickers and giggles. In addition to humorous euphemisms, he also covers serious topics like the verbal misdirection employed by governments and the military, examining how they can be used to manipulate. There’s also a decent treatment of the anthropological underpinnings of the entire concept of euphemisms and why they’re so necessary to oil social interaction.

Gary Schroeder

“Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms” by Ralph Keyes (Little, Brown, $24.99)

Was Shakespeare right? Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Surely, being Shakespeare, he was right, his point being that what matters is what something is, not what it is called.

The rest of us, however, not being Shakespeare, beg to differ. Many times the important thing is what something is called. And, as Ralph Keyes demonstrates in his delightful “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms,” frequently that is not sweet at all.

“Euphemania” is not a compilation of euphemisms (though it contains plenty), “but a consideration of the ways euphemisms enter our conversations and how they reflect their time and place.” Keyes, a journalist and author of several other books, says his theme is that euphemisms are a barometer of changing attitudes, placing a spotlight on what most concerns humans at any given time.

“Euphemism” derives from Eupheme, the nurse to the Muses of ancient Greece. The name literally means “good speaking.” The author’s definition of euphemism is broad, taking in slang, jargon, and double entendres: “words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy.”

That which makes us uneasy has changed dramatically over time. Once meant to avoid blasphemy and impoliteness, euphemisms today are regularly used to obfuscate and to cover up embarrassing situations. Negatives are changed into positives‚Äî”life insurance” is really “death insurance” ‚Äî or the vivid (“dumps”) is replaced by the innocuous (“landfills”).

In general, euphemisms for sexual activity have lost much of their judgmental flavor. We have gone from “living in sin” to “without benefit of clergy” to “shacking up” to “living together,” the last being hardly a euphemism at all.

What inspires the most secretiveness and taboos ‚Äî more than sex, body parts, disease and death ‚Äî is money. We tiptoe around finances for many reasons, including gentility and self-preservation, but also, especially in today’s world of high finance, to create a verbal fog, to camouflage and obfuscate or to make something sound the very opposite of what it is.

All of this brings to mind George Orwell’s comment, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Politics, war and international affairs are just as rich in this sort of doublespeak. The Bush administration enshrined its easing of environmental regulations as the Clean Air Act. Outright defeat becomes “defensive victory” and a missile that can kill tens of millions is called the Peacekeeper.

Keyes gives several reasons we euphemize: among others, to comfort ourselves, to preserve privacy, to demarcate class, and as “code” within groups (“dog whistle discourse” that only the cognoscenti ‚Äî such as families with pet private euphemisms ‚Äî can understand). Humans have invented an infinite number of ways to say not quite what they mean.

– ROGER K. MILLER

His new book is Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.

Keyes lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he writes, lectures, and is a Trustee of the Antioch Writers’ Workshop.

Recently I asked him what he was reading.  His reply:

I recently read, and loved Room. By being able to capture the distinctive voice of a unique five-year-old and have him tell a riveting story Emma Donoghue has created a literary tour de force. Winter’s Bone is another captivating novel, especially when the author lets his Ozark characters tell their story in their own voice. (When he describes the terrain in elaborate language apparently meant to impress fellow alums of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Daniel Woodrell’s book lags.) I just finished Amos Oz’s memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness which has moments of great insight and some powerfully written passages, but overall is twice too long. Oz never uses one word when ten will do. The writer whose work I’ve most admired in recent years is Richard Russo, especially his novels set in declining towns (Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, Bridge of Sighs, etc.) Russo gets you to care deeply about his woebegone characters, no mean feat. He also can be drop-dead funny.

“You son-of-a-bitch!” like many exclamations takes on a different meaning with different voice inflections and in different contexts. Remember the old story of the preacher who was mad but wouldn’t curse, so he told his adversary, “When you get home, I hope your mother runs out from under the porch and bites you on the leg!” According to Ralph Keyes, author of Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, language is in constant flux just as our social values. He says, “Good words become bad words become good words again, in endless succession,” – a virtual “euphemism carousel.”

Euphemisms are actually just synonyms – or at least a type of synonym. We use and invent them to lower the temperature of “hot button” words or subjects. We use this device to neutralize words that make us feel uncomfortable. Our culture does the same thing generally and hence, “political correctness.” Keyes says, “Euphemisms are an accurate barometer of changing attitudes,” and that is the theme of his book.

Just as some felt that religion was a tool of the state and aristocracy to control the masses, now many feel that language has become an instrument of commercial, political and postmodern doublespeak. Reminds me of 1984. California researchers, Bandler and Grinder made a case for our individual choices of words being an insight to our psyche. According to them, our subconscious choice of predicates was significant. If that’s correct, what does it say about our conscious use of euphemisms?

Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms is not a reference book, although it does have a complete bibliography and a thorough index. Unlike a dictionary or thesaurus, it isn’t intended as a quick look up type book. Rather it is filled with stories and commentaries on both historical and contemporary euphemisms.

Stories make the history and evolution of our language both charming and memorable. The Smothers Brothers employed the creativity of their writers along with their ulterior motives to slip puns and cultural references (often sexual) by the censors. Others, like George Carlin and Lenny Bruce were more blunt. Perhaps as much as any famous politician, Winston Churchill was the source of many stories involving not just language, but the differences in usage of the same language by different countries (Wilde and Shaw). No doubt, William Safire would have reveled in participation in this discussion. Despite the changes in our culture and society, we still seem to have problems/issues/opportunities with sex, anatomy, death, war, and money. Is Playboy a “skin mag” or a “gentlemen’s” publication? Keyes offers absorbing, interesting, and often humorous stories of how we use words. Whether you are a writer, reader or both, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms deserves a spot in your library, perhaps right next to Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories.

http://technorati.com/entertainment/article/euphemania-our-love-affair-with-euphemisms/

BY ROGER K. MILLER

Published: February 27, 2011

“Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms” by Ralph Keyes (Little, Brown, $24.99)

Was Shakespeare right? Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Surely, being Shakespeare, he was right, his point being that what matters is what something is, not what it is called.

The rest of us, however, not being Shakespeare, beg to differ. Many times the important thing is what something is called. And, as Ralph Keyes demonstrates in his delightful “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms,” frequently that is not sweet at all.

“Euphemania” is not a compilation of euphemisms (though it contains plenty), “but a consideration of the ways euphemisms enter our conversations and how they reflect their time and place.” Keyes, a journalist and author of several other books, says his theme is that euphemisms are a barometer of changing attitudes, placing a spotlight on what most concerns humans at any given time.

“Euphemism” derives from Eupheme, the nurse to the Muses of ancient Greece. The name literally means “good speaking.” The author’s definition of euphemism is broad, taking in slang, jargon, and double entendres: “words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy.”

That which makes us uneasy has changed dramatically over time. Once meant to avoid blasphemy and impoliteness, euphemisms today are regularly used to obfuscate and to cover up embarrassing situations. Negatives are changed into positives—”life insurance” is really “death insurance” — or the vivid (“dumps”) is replaced by the innocuous (“landfills”).

In general, euphemisms for sexual activity have lost much of their judgmental flavor. We have gone from “living in sin” to “without benefit of clergy” to “shacking up” to “living together,” the last being hardly a euphemism at all.

What inspires the most secretiveness and taboos — more than sex, body parts, disease and death — is money. We tiptoe around finances for many reasons, including gentility and self-preservation, but also, especially in today’s world of high finance, to create a verbal fog, to camouflage and obfuscate or to make something sound the very opposite of what it is.

All of this brings to mind George Orwell’s comment, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Politics, war and international affairs are just as rich in this sort of doublespeak. The Bush administration enshrined its easing of environmental regulations as the Clean Air Act. Outright defeat becomes “defensive victory” and a missile that can kill tens of millions is called the Peacekeeper.

Keyes gives several reasons we euphemize: among others, to comfort ourselves, to preserve privacy, to demarcate class, and as “code” within groups (“dog whistle discourse” that only the cognoscenti — such as families with pet private euphemisms — can understand). Humans have invented an infinite number of ways to say not quite what they mean.

Roger K. Miller’s latest novel is “Dragon in Amber”

Sunday, February 20, 2011

I was reading a book about euphemisms just as federal spending was being relabeled “investments” and new dietary guidelines turned hamburgers into “solid fats and added sugar.”

The government can’t talk without euphemisms, but, then again, neither can the rest of us.

Ralph Keyes, a Yellow Springs author of many books, explains why in Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms (Little, Brown; 279 pages; $24.99).

“Any word or phrase that gives us pause is a candidate for euphemizing,” Keyes writes. “What gives us pause varies from place to place, however, and from era to era.”

Surely, few eras were as wacky as the 18th and 19th centuries, when the growing middle class in England became particularly prudish about language.

Keyes notes that every body part needed a euphemism, so legs became limbs and breasts became bosoms. Even poultry parts were considered unmentionable.

Eventually, Americans followed suit, leading to a delightful Winston Churchill story. At a dinner party in Virginia, he was reprimanded by a woman who said his request for a chicken breast should have been phrased more delicately as “white meat.”

Keyes writes: “The next day, Churchill sent the woman a corsage with the message ‘Pin this on your white meat.’”

Euphemisms cover all phases of life, but government is almost unthinkable without them.

As wars became increasingly bloody in the 20th century, governments – including ours – worked all the harder to sanitize the language around them, Keyes says.

Invasions became incursions, doomsday missiles were dubbed Peacekeepers, and dead soldiers became the fallen.

In the 21st century, torture was redefined as enhanced interrogation and escalation as a surge (“making the massive influx of fresh American troops into Iraq sound like a soft drink,” Keyes writes).

Less deadly matters also inspire euphemisms. Last week, President Barack Obama was selling the investments in his budgets. Another term for them is spending.

Meanwhile, a federal agency announced that it could find no evidence that Toyotas accelerate on their own. That leaves only one other possibility: bad driving. The government chose a softer term: pedal misapplication.

Americans are also trying to digest the new federal dietary guidelines. As nutrition expert Marion Nestle notes, politicians dare not annoy the beef and pork industries by urging people to eat less meat.

They instead advise eating fewer solid fats and added sugars, or “SoFAS” for short. (Perhaps couch potatoes will be more likely to listen.)

Predictably, a good deal of the book is devoted to euphemisms for sex or the body parts involved in it. Many of the euphemisms are more descriptive than the terms they’re trying to hide.

But I won’t go into that, because, this being a family newspaper, I’d have to invent euphemisms for the euphemisms.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.

It seems appropriate to allow Churchill the final word. His response is difficult to top when discussing the pitfalls of euphemism.

As lovers of language know, the byways of English—its patterns and its idiosyncrasies—reveal a great deal about its users. Euphemisms are perhaps the most revealing byway of all.

One of the most insidious of all euphemisms shows up on the illustrated jacket of Ralph Keyes’s book: the term “friendly fire.” For those of us publishing nonfiction or fiction about American military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam—to name three obvious wars—why are we softening the ugly reality of U.S. soldiers shooting other U.S. soldiers with the happy sounding (“friendly”) phrase?

Most of our readers will understand the underlying meaning of the term. But do those readers require an escape from ugly reality? And do other readers end up confused by the euphemism?

Lots of books about language convey “fun”—the fun of puns and jokes and famous quotations and homonyms and anagrams. Euphemisms, on the other hand, may be fun, but are not always fun and games.

Keyes recognizes the dangers to a society of relying on euphemisms—of, for example, “mincing words” (one chapter title) and using “brave new words” (another chapter title) to create an ambiguous and maybe downright harmful brave new world.

Here’s a key paragraph from Keyes’ playbook:

“Euphemisms are nothing if not adaptable. A BBC correspondent just back from covering the conflict in [the] Congo told a radio interviewer that soldiers there were ‘self provisioning.’ When asked what this meant, the correspondent conceded that was a euphemism for ‘loot and steal.’ Obviously, language evolves constantly. But in public discourse especially, its evolution has been in a blandly euphemistic direction. Taken to an extreme, as it so often is, such discourse can be deadly. That’s because it enlists words in the service of evasion rather than communication.”

The word “lying” sounds harsh. It should, because lies are hurtful. “Spinning” sounds less harsh. But “spinning” constitutes “lying,” so why not call it what it is?”

This is what Keyes terms euphemania—taking the sting out of frank, clear words by converting them into inoffensive, synonym-like versions that desensitize us to the implications of, say, torture (“applying pressure”) or a stock market collapse (“equity retreat”).”

As Keyes surveys the territory of euphemania, he devotes distinct chapters to euphemisms for sexual acts, parts of the human anatomy, defecation/urination, diseases, death, food, money and warfare.

It would be easy to fill the Paste website with remarkable examples that Keyes elucidates. One I have unthinkingly written hundreds of times (especially when serving as a Washington, D.C., correspondent for newspapers and magazines) involves the word “special.” As in “Joe Jones, the special assistant to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.”

What, if anything, is “special” about that special assistant named Joe Jones? What is so special about Joe Jones’s job that it should be termed “special?” Keyes cites another scholar of euphemisms, R.W. Holder, author of How Not to Say What You Mean, as stating “special” is a word that “makes the ears of a collector of euphemisms prick up.”

Other mea culpas: Why have I failed to challenge the government agency called the Defense Department, when Offense Department would often seem more appropriate? Why have I allowed climate change skeptics to define the degradation as an “issue” instead of as a “problem?” Why have I allowed an entire controversial industry to market “life insurance” instead of “death insurance?”

Many writers come dangerously close to crossing the line of untruth by, well, mincing words. Keyes points out the writers who term somebody “flushed” instead of “drunk;” exhibits “gravitas” instead of “pompousness;” “colorful” instead of “loudmouthed;” “mercurial” instead of “bad tempered.”

It is rarely pleasant to write about male impotence. But does that justify using the term “erectile dysfunction?”

I can’t stop just yet. That’s because euphemisms are about censorship, too, and, like all writers who make their living with words, I hate what censorship does to a virile democratic society. “Using euphemisms is the verbal equivalent of draping nude statues,” Keyes comments, and I do not want anybody in the society where I reside to decide that nude statues ought to be draped.

Hooray for the language lovers practicing what Keyes calls “candor restoration,” honing the edges of English. A group of lesbian motorcyclists term themselves “Dykes on Bikes.” Eve Ensler titles her play “Vagina Monologues.” Dick Gregory and Randall Kennedy both publish books titled “Nigger,” hoping public use of a taboo word will defang it. Other anti-euphemism heroes include James Joyce, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Anais Nin, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Richard Pryor.

I’m not a famous anti-euphemism hero. (Yet.) But I work hard as a writer and citizen to say what I mean. I have resided in two metropolises where my Caucasian heritage placed me in the minority. Still, I never use the term “inner city” or the term” ghetto” to mean a place where low-income blacks live. When euphemisms double as insulting racial or ethnic or gender stereotypes, the destruction doubles, too.

So … please, think before you speak. Or write. And thank Ralph Keyes for spending years compiling examples for a book about language that goes beyond mere fun. He’s a real spin-meister.

– Steve Weinberg

February 13, 2011

What could be more fun than mocking yesterday’s euphemisms? Open a copy of Mencken’s “The American Language” and you find our American forebears exclaiming “nerts!” (to avoid the naughty “nuts!”) and calling their legs “limbs” or “benders.” Then there are the benighted Brits, for whom Poe’s “The Gold Bug” was retitled “The Golden Beetle,” since “bug” to them meant only the (unmentionable) bedbug.

We may not be quite so delicate today, but euphemism — from the Greek for “auspicious speech” — is with us still. Our rooster and weather vane date from the 19th century, when cock became too vivid for polite American discourse. (So strong was the taboo that Bronson Alcocke, father of Louisa May, changed the family name to Alcott.) For public tough talk about courage, we translate our favorite English slang into Spanish, like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, and compliment folks on their cojones. (Or tone it down further, George Will-style, and ask if a leader has the “kidneys” for the job.)

Euphemisms can be private or public, trivial or deadly, serious or joky — but they can’t be dispensed with, says Ralph Keyes in his new book “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.” So long as humans have had things to be discreet about, they’ve had names that furnish some rhetorical distance from the things themselves. “Penis, Latin for ‘tail,’ in Cicero’s time was put to work as a euphemism for the male sex organ,” notes Keyes. (And just as some writers groused, in recent decades, that a former meaning of gay had been filched from them, Cicero complained that he could no longer call a tail a tail, now that the word meant something else.)

For modern Americans, of course, penis is just the scientifically correct name. Over the centuries, the job of euphemizing the organ has been handed off to hundreds of other words, some short-lived and others more durable. This is the typical life of a euphemism: a ride on what Keyes calls the “euphemism carousel” and Steven Pinker called the “euphemism treadmill.” By either metaphor, a euphemism wears out as it becomes too familiarly linked to the thing it designates; its distancing powers fade, and it’s abandoned, temporarily or permanently, for a newer term.

Any word, however inoffensive it looks, can wear out its welcome this way. It’s hard to imagine a more abstract word than undertaker, for instance: “One who undertakes a task.” But as a euphemism for “one who handles funerals,” it acquired a morbid aura in less than 200 years. By the end of the 19th century, writes Keyes, “undertakers had promoted themselves first to funeral directors, then to morticians…presumably because it sounded like ‘physician.’ ”

This process takes time, naturally; at the moment, some American parents think butt is a fine word for kids to use, while others still hear it as vulgar. Specific terms aside, though, we all know how to tailor our language to the audience of the moment. Even the most plain-spoken among us seem content with a world where some words are off limits to 3-year-olds and radio bloviators. And this euphemizing of intimate matters — death, bodily functions, sex — seems like a perfectly reasonable social contract: I’ll pretend I would never picture you on the toilet, or in your coffin, if you’ll pretend the same in return.

But euphemisms, as Keyes notes, aren’t limited to these universal human realms. They also have their dark, Orwellian public side. And the use of euphemism by the powerful — insiders and authorities of all stripes — involves a different relationship between the euphemizer and euphemizee. We all know what “passed away” really means, whether it’s our idiom or not. But when a finance guy euphemizes risky investments as “subprime loans” or a military officer calls dead civilians “collateral damage,” the obfuscating language can begin to sound like professional terminology — the equivalent of the doctor’s “MI” for “heart attack” — rather than what it is, an intentional attempt at misdirection. When euphemisms cover up things we aren’t familiar with (and often don’t want to know better), they’re much more insidious than the polite evasions of everyday life.

In fact, the whole subject would be easier to talk about if we assigned euphemisms to two separate categories — benign and malign, maybe. To call the room where you urinate a “bathroom” or refer to a sexual act as “sleeping with” is hardly sinister; it’s merely following a set of cultural expectations, just like using napkins or saying “please pass the salt.” Describing a patient’s MRI as “worrisome” rather than “dire” may be a (temporary) hedge, but it’s also a human gesture.

But telling citizens that torture is “abuse” and mercenaries are “contractors” — or in Orwell’s words, that burning and bombing villages is “pacification” — is a different sort of enterprise. These euphemisms — the top-down terminology invented and deployed to serve the interests of the coiners — are the ones that give “euphemism” a bad name.

– Jan Freeman

Transcript below:

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I’m Melissa Block.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

And I’m Robert Siegel.

In his new book about euphemisms, Ralph Keyes takes me back to browsing through a book on my parents’ bookshelf about 50 years ago. It was a psychology text, probably written sometime before the Second World War, probably for some education course my father took. And it described the precise ranges of IQ that defined an idiot, a moron and an imbecile.

My father instructed me that those terms and the broad category that included them all, the feeble-minded, were old ways of saying what we now said more properly. Such people were not to be called feeble-minded, idiotic, imbecilic or moronic. They were to be called retarded, mentally retarded. It was only deep into adulthood that I realized after using that word, that phrase, that it had become completely unacceptable.

So it goes with euphemisms. One generation’s version of polite and scientific is the next generation’s standard for ham-fisted and defamatory.

How and why this happens is the stuff of Ralph Keyes’ book, “Euphemania.” And the author joins us now from Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Welcome.

Mr. RALPH KEYES (Author, “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms”): Thank you.

SIEGEL: And I want you to explain the point you make in this book that many of the expressions, which we avoid by using euphemisms instead, were themselves introduced as euphemisms.

Mr. KEYES: That happens all the time, Robert. Look at what’s happening with hookup. I’m old enough to remember if I said 20, 25 years ago, I’m going to hookup with my wife in Grand Central Station, nobody would have batted an eyelash. If I said that today, I would be in deep doo-doo.

SIEGEL: To use a euphemism. Our challenge here is to discuss things for which we use euphemisms precisely because we don’t want to discuss them.

Mr. KEYES: Exactly.

SIEGEL: And a big part of what you’re talking about in the book is bodily functions. Why are we so squeamish about bodily functions?

Mr. KEYES: Well, there’s been a lot of research that shows whatever disgusts us is a prime candidate for euphemism, and so we come up with different words to refer to them. At one time, the word body wax was a euphemism for excrement.

SIEGEL: And as you write, there are a great many words that have a Latinate, scientific air about them. Defecate is one…

Mr. KEYES: Yeah. Yup.

SIEGEL: They sound authoritatively authentic, but as often as not, they were just dug up to replace some coarser words.

Mr. KEYES: Exactly. Copulate is a Latinate word that simply meant at one time joined together. Then, of course, it became a euphemism for a certain kind of joining together, and now that’s pretty much all it means.

SIEGEL: At the end of “Euphemania,” your book, you turn to linguistics and evolutionary biology for a theory, which I find very interesting, of why blurting some words in moments of anger or fear or pain may be fundamentally different from expressing ourselves reasonably with language. And therein may lie the difference between some words that we use without thinking, and then the way we think how not to use them.

Mr. KEYES: Yes. It’s well-known that some people who suffer certain kinds of stroke lose their ability to speak, but they don’t lose their ability to curse. And this has led linguistic researchers to conclude that swearing comes from a very primitive part of our brain and almost as not language at all. It’s closer, say, to a dog’s barking than to actual sophisticated conversation.

So euphemisms, the ability to create indirect ways of referring to topics that make us uncomfortable, I think, illustrates a fairly high order of intelligence and evolution.

You know, when Shakespeare called the sex act, making the beast with two backs, we had a very creative mind at work.

SIEGEL: An area of language where it’s less obvious to me why we should have so many euphemisms is eating and food. There’s a whole – OK, many euphemisms surrounding food.

Mr. KEYES: Well, there certainly are. You think back to the words sweetbreads for the thymus glands. Who wants to eat thymus glands? But sweetbreads doesn’t sound so bad. Rocky Mountain oysters for fried calves’ testicles or lambs’ testicles.

But we don’t even have to go that far back. The fish we today call Chilean sea bass, and have for the last 30-some years, originally was called the Patagonian toothfish – not too appetizing. Orange roughy is a euphemism for the fish that was originally called the slimehead.

SIEGEL: But the Patagonian toothfish is the case of a name for fish. And there’s this – a man who renamed it Chilean sea bass. That was actually a piece of marketing.

Mr. KEYES: Yes, Lee Lantz, a fish wholesaler in Los Angeles. And he just said, this is a good fish. Nobody wants to eat it. Let’s just change the name. He came up with Chilean sea bass. And voila, it became so popular under the new name, that now there’s a movement to limit its catch and limit eating it in restaurants.

SIEGEL: At one time, you remark, to mention – just to say legs – I guess this is in the Victorian era – to speak of legs, right there, this would be a remarkably rude thing to introduce into conversation.

Mr. KEYES: Yes. Legs were considered a very suggestive part of the anatomy. Women in Victorian times not only covered them up, but they thought that using the very word was suggestive. So you were not supposed to say leg. You said limb.

SIEGEL: Extremities was also…

Mr. KEYES: Extremities is a – yes, is another word. And this then got carried over, going back to food, into poultry. You know, when you were invited to have dinner at someone’s house, you knew better than to ask for a leg. You asked for a drumstick.

When Winston Churchill, after World War I, was eating at a wealthy home in Virginia, the butler asked him what kind of chicken meat he’d like. And he said, some breasts, please. Well, the woman next to him blanched and said, we don’t use that word here. And Mr. Churchill said, well, what word do you use? She said, white meat. So the next day, he sent the woman a corsage with a card stuck in the middle that said, stick this on your white meat.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: Ralph Keyes, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Mr. KEYES: Thank you, Mr. Siegel.

SIEGEL: Ralph Keyes is the author of “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.”

This compendium of quotes from Oscar Wilde is arranged by subject matter alphabetically and provides a great deal of entertainment for $7 bucks. Not to mention it is the ultimate source for witty quotations to make you the life of the party. Seriously, a great book to page through at random for some laughs and thought provoking witticisms from the most quotable modern author.

R. J. Marsella (California)

Oscar Wilde once said “Drama is the meeting place of art and life.” In this essential, compact volume Ralph Keyes leaves a trail to that corner by gathering the flamboyant author’s thorniest, at times most insightful quotes and anecdotes. Keyes uses Wilde’s plays, reviews, letters, interrogations, even conversational repartee (given its own section) which remained Wilde’s signature to his time.

Keyes divides Wilde’s epigrams and puns into brief, easily readable sections. Wilde twists traditional views on permanent truths and those of his day: altruism (“Charity creates a multitude of sins.”) history (“History is merely gossip.”) theology, poverty, dissent (“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”)

Above all, Wilde (through Keyes’ selections) quips and dissects each of the fine arts (music, prose, painting) and roles for creator, viewer, interpreter. He addresses the writer (“Even prophets correct their proofs.”) critic (“Criticism is the highest form of autobiography”), and artist (“Like the Greek gods, artists are known only to each other.”)

Amid his fast-paced one liners on male-female relations you sense how Wilde viewed marriage over and above his well-known bromide, “Divorces are made in heaven.” The book ends with Wilde explaining and defending the homosexual relationship he called “the love that dare not speak its name”. Whether or not you accept Wilde’s lifestyle preferences, his eloquent, sad defense of a letter he wrote a younger man is moving as he describes the unique merge of intellect and youthful energy which to him formed “the noblest sort of affection.” It is as close to heartfelt as anyone could get who once said, “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

Oscar Wilde was parodied, vilified, and eventually imprisoned for his beliefs and flamboyance. But he eventually influenced artists from George Bernard Shaw to John Lennon, staking a claim as the earliest example of a postmodern artist. This book helps introduce Wilde’s full books and plays (Keyes references them consistently and provides a full bibliography), or helps you reference witty, intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual, as Wilde might have preferred) quotes for any occasion. (As to plagiarizing, Wilde himself called it, “the privilege of the appreciative man.”) His full literary courses are nutritious and filling enough, but The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde is as savory when reading or writing as salt is when dining.

Anthony G. Pizza (Florida)

camianacademy.homeschooljournal.net/archives/94

I read the book of Truman quotations in a couple of hours. The author was very selective, focusing on the Give’em hell, Harry one-liners and sound-bites. Truman had a charming sense of humor and a unique manner of expressing himself. If that’s what you are looking for, this is a good book. I’m glad I bought it.

What I missed was the more thoughtful expressions of Truman about the beginnings of the Cold War, which began in Truman’s mind when he met Stalin at Potsdam; the expression of the matured, post New Deal version of Liberalism, which hatched in his brain after the death of Roosevelt; his dislike of the the presidency; and his candid opinions of the powerful men with whom he interacted.

“We had won the war. It was my hope now that the people of Germany and Japan could be rehabilitated…. The United States wanted no territory, no reparations. Peace and happiness for all countries were the goals toward which we would work and for which we had fought. No nation in the history of the world had taken such a position in complete victory. No nation with the military power of the United States of America had been so generous to its enemies and so helpful to its friends. Maybe the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount could be put into effect.” — from Truman’s Memoirs

T. Duke (West Texas)

This book was an excellent insight into the President who never lost sight of the fact that he was nothing more than a common man. Refreshing attitudes that we do not seem to see in politicians today. In his own words, on many subjects, and shooting from the hip his words provide a greater understanding to what Harry Truman was made of. I recommend this book to anyone who would like to know more about Harry Truman or anyone who has an interest in U.S. history.

The Highlander (Richfield, PA)

This is not a full-scale biography of Harry Truman, but it would serve as a fabulous introduction to him. This is a short book, but contains a wealth of personal anecdotes, quotes and compilations from Truman’s private conversations and letters. It’s so refreshing to reflect upon Truman, a politician who almost always said what he thought and did what he thought best. There was no posturing with him, no p.r. campaigns, no manipulating the media. Every morning he would take his 2 mile stroll (at a clip of 15 minutes per mile, not bad for a man over 60), and the press would be running after him, hoping for a quote for the morning paper.

Also included in the book is information on Truman’s close relationship with this anchor, Bess, as well as their daughter, Margaret. The famous episode where Truman attacked a columnist for ridiculing Margaret’s singing voice is included. If you’re unfamiliar with this, it will definitely make you laugh! Truman was rough around the edges, yet a highly skilled and intelligent man; he was well-read, articulate in a plain sort of way and an astute judge of character. His opinions on Ike and MacArthur justify the purchase of this book. Enjoy!

Candace Scott (Lake Arrowhead, CA, USA)

This collection of quotes, letters, and anecdotes gives the reader a comprehensive overview of Truman’s life as well as insight into the kind of man he truly was. This book allows the reader to feel connected to Truman in a way a biography can not.

“liw” (Kansas City, MO)

This is a wonderful collection of quotes, letters, and anecdotes which together give the reader a quick view of Truman’s life as well as a mental picture of the man from many different instances and viewpoints. This book, because of its clear depiction of Truman’s character, makes the reader feel connected to Truman in a way that a biography perhaps does not.

A Customer

The author captures the essence of the man.  A must read for anybody fed up with superficial politicans.

Brysonmacdonald “caperbayboy” (Charlottetown PEI)

So, under “Children” you can find, “I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and advise them to do it.” Under “Politics,” “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?” And on his own presidency, to Adlai Stevenson, “If a knucklehead like me can be president and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

Washington: “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.”

Politics: “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt.”

Economics: “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.”

Ralph Keyes notes in his book Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It … that labour savors enable us to to take less time doing a given task, so we do more tasks because of this saved time.  Thus, as more is done, we want to cut down on the time to do these additional tasks, so more efficient labour savers save the time, thus enabling us to do more stuff.  Keyes points out that the more we try to control time, the more time controls us.

It seems that noise, intensity, and ‘pump-it-up’-ness is on the rise.  In conjunction with time compression, this can be a nightmare.  See Ralph Keyes’s book Timelock for a good description of this.

Otoh [on the other hand], people like me somehow gravitate to busy schedules and trying to maximize experience within a time frame, so it does work both ways. Ralph Keyes’s SUPERB  book called Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It describes it like this: we live in a time-tense society, so that people who are already predisposed to a fast-paced, high-stress, and long-hours type of lifestyle are going to find these traits magnified by cultural influences.  He recommends scheduling time out, to take a break, and to slot in time during the day for “pauses.”

Again, this stuff is discussed in detail in Ralph Keyes’s book Timelock, and I highly recommend it for a good read.

Arthur K. Weathers, Jr., DDS, editor

M.G. Lord

Linda Wright Moore

In ‘Euphemania,’ Ralph Keyes looks at euphemisms — how they came to be and why we use them. His earlier book looked at vintage phrases.

By Lori Kozlowski Los Angeles Times

January 27, 2011

It’s the way that we talk that fascinates Ralph Keyes. The words we choose to express the hurtful, the bawdy and what we perceive as shameful are of particular interest — because those are the subjects society feels the need to cover up.

We switch from “sex” to “sleeping together;” from “dead” to “pushing up daisies;” even “chicken breast” became “white meat” after Winston Churchill was once scolded for using it at a dinner party.

The follow-up to Keyes’ first effort on linguistics — “I Love It When You Talk Retro,” which examined vintage phrases like “drop a dime” and “double whammy” — “Euphemania” takes his passion for the oddities of language a bit further. He examines all of those replacement phrases and asks why we made the changes in the first place.

“Euphemisms,” he writes, “have a bright side and a dark side.” They are both our way of avoiding touchy topics that should be confronted and an effort to civilize everyday discourse. We have a tendency to give things a positive spin. Making things more rosy is, perhaps, best demonstrated by the term “life insurance,” which is actually death insurance.

There are various reasons for our gentle brushing over of the cold, hard truth, Keyes says. Some are rooted in our comfort level with sensitive topics, our sense of privacy, the need for creativity with words subject to censorship; euphemisms can also be markers of social class.

While we sweep up sex, politics, affairs, murder and other forms of mayhem into catchy, sometimes memorable phrases that give our listeners the idea of what we are trying to say without our saying it directly, the author asks: Are we a society that can’t utter some things at all? He also questions whether using more delicate phrases makes us nicer or somehow more genteel.

It’s an old practice: We’ve been using euphemisms and alternative phrases since the days of Cicero in Rome. In fact, the word “euphemism” comes from the name of the nurse of the ancient Greek Muses — Eupheme, whose name literally means “good speaking.”

As time passes, sometimes the kinder phrases we’ve created become less preferred; the “euphemism carousel” shows what was once old can become new again — or rather what was once bad can become good again (and vice versa). Keyes examines the idea of “blinding them with science” in that calling something by its formal scientific name somehow makes it more official and can sanitize the language in a clinical way. (Prophylactic, anyone?)

If a bit repetitive at times, “Euphemania” takes the reader through a whirlwind of historical moments and doesn’t hold back when explaining curse words, bodily functions and how, generally, we like to keep things nice and tidy when we talk to each other.

lori.kozlowski@latimes.com

Judson Jerome

Success in today’s business economy demands nonstop innovation. But fancy buzzwords, facile lip service, and simplistic formulas are not the answer. Only an entirely new mindset — a new attitude toward success and failure — can transform managers’ thinking, according to Richard Farson, author of the bestseller Management of the Absurd, and Ralph Keyes, author of the pathbreaking Chancing It: Why We Take Risks, in this provocative new work.

According to Farson and Keyes, the key to this new attitude lies in taking risks. In a rapidly changing economy, managers will confront at least as much failure as success. Does that mean they’ll have failed? Only by their grandfathers’ definition of failure. Both success and failure are steps toward achievement, say the authors. After all, Coca-Cola’s renaissance grew directly out of its New Coke debacle, and severe financial distress forced IBM to completely reinvent itself.

An interesting discussion on the need of failures. According to the authors, in a rapidly changing economy managers will confront at least as much failure as success. Does that mean they’ll have failed? Only by their grandfathers’ definition of failure.

Both success and failure are steps toward achievement, say the authors. After all, Coca-Cola’s renaissance grew directly out of its New Coke debacle, and severe financial distress forced IBM to completely reinvent itself.

Management by trial and error. All the senior marketers we invited to a marketing panel on innovation agreed that every successful innovation they had realized was based on many projects that never made it.

Isn’t it a shame that while we all know this is true, so few of us are prepared to accept credits for the successes as well as the “failures”?

- Michele Mees, The House of Marketing

One day she’s sending off résumés and demo tapes to television networks, the next she’s licking stamps and mailing out medical school applications.

Heather Basciano is keeping her options open.

Summer’s almost over and the 24-year-old Torontonian is making the most of her extended vacation, mostly catching up with friends and pounding the pavement – hoping to catch a break.

She used to be a “Lofter,” on camera 24/7 for the whole wired world to see, working as a host on the Internet reality-based television station U8TV.com.

The gig was supposed to last for a year, but ended abruptly in late June when the network pulled out, canceling the show U8TV: The Lofters and shutting down the U8TV.com Web site, leaving Basciano and her eight roommates without a job.

Now the bubbly blonde is still trying to find out where she belongs and what she wants to do, without a camera trailing her every move.

“Six months living like that and some old habits are hard to break,” she says in an interview.

“At first it was hard for me to not keep checking on my invisible microphone and (to not) keep looking around to the side to check if the camera was looking at me.”

Wiser from the experience, she admits to missing the novelty factor and semi-celebrity status that came with the job, but at the same time welcomes the return of her privacy.

“I am thrilled to be back to normal and get started on my real reality right now,” she says.

More than two months out of the loft, she’s still unemployed, but not too worried. She knows something will fall into place.

Instead of filling her days hosting shows about love, news, music, life and entertainment, she spends her time surfing the Internet, browsing classified ads and networking.

She’s also taking a couple of acting and improvisation classes to hone her skills.

And if it nothing pans out soon, she’s considering packing up and moving to Los Angeles this fall.

“I’m going to go and try and get an agent,” she says.

“I’m not expecting anything, but it will be an adventure and if something happens, great.”

Her adventurous outlook explains why she’s gushing about a book she just read, Whoever Makes The Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation, by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes.

A business management book, the authors reason that while some failure is an inevitable part of the road to success, it actually may aid in the process of achieving it. They’re encouraging readers to take chances and learn from their mistakes.

“This book is totally the way I live,” she says. “I just picked the book up off the shelf and couldn’t put it down.”

A Queen’s University life science and biology graduate, Basciano is still a newcomer to the entertainment business.

After giving up a job as a pharmaceutical rep to take the job as a Lofter, her six-month stint was among her first experiences on camera.

“I took a huge chance. I threw away a really good career, a company car, a two-bedroom apartment and lots of money,” she says of her decision to become a Lofter.

“It was scary throwing that all away and doing something so ludicrous, but then all of a sudden I realized that it would open up so many opportunities that I wouldn’t have had before.”

Her mother thinks it was a huge mistake, but Basciano doesn’t see it that way. She’s realized she likes acting and hosting, and if it doesn’t work out, she still has her education to fall back on.

She’s also learned she has strong opinions and 24 years of experiences to share with others.

As a Lofter, Basciano never dreamed how powerful her voice would become as a tool to help others.

“People would ask me advice about everything, ranging from what they should do about their husband cheating, to how do they subtly ask for a raise at work, to detailed disparities of depression and confidence issues,” she says.

Viewers found comfort in the fact that Basciano has her own quirks and problems, which she never shied away from sharing. Of all the shows she hosted, she received the most feedback from a series recounting her experience being raped as a teenager.

After those shows aired, women started sending her e-mails detailing their personal stories and commending her for her bravery. The e-mails never stopped coming. Basciano guesses in six months she received about 7,000, each one of which she responded to.

Sitting in her new bedroom earlier this summer, staring at the walls of the uptown apartment she now shares with her two roommates, she says she misses the type of interaction she had with viewers and the opportunity to help others.

She’s sad that U8TV is over, but proud for taking such a big chance.

“I figure if you have the opportunity to do something in your life that you’ll probably never do again, then just do it … This was my one year to push the envelope and really explore my creative side.”

Now she’s looking to the future, gearing up to pounce on whatever opportunities cross her path.

They say it is the paradox of innovation: That in order to succeed, we must learn to fail. Think of all the great inventions that came from mistakes, all the great products that were developed in pursuit of something else… But if failure is such a good thing, why are compensation and performance evaluation so geared against it? We’ll pick up some new ideas in Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins, all this week on Business Prescriptions….

Those who want to have a better understanding of what motivates bosses, employees and peers should read Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins, a new book by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes.  This small gem, published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division, is packed with easily understood, interesting and useful philosophy.

This is one of the most thought-provoking management books to come out in recent years.  As its subtitle, “The Paradox of Innovation,” suggests, much of the volume is devoted to innovation successes and failures, but its management suggestions go far beyond that.

“In personal and professional lives alike, neither success nor failure is what it seems to be,” the authors point out.  “That is the book’s basic message.  Success and failure can be hard to tell apart; one leads to the other and both have value.  That conclusion has led to its most counter-intuitive suggestion for leaders: Treat success and failure similarly, not with rewards or sanction, but personal engagement.  We have tried to show how many more management approaches become possible once conventional notions of success and failure are discarded.

“A both/and rather than either/or approach makes it easier to encourage inventiveness, support mavericks, do simultaneous planning, and destroy apparently successful businesses to make way for new ones that might fail – or win big.  At the heart of this posture is greater acceptance of failure as a necessary part of innovation.  This acceptance produces work environments that are genuinely risk-friendly, which is to say, failure-tolerant.  Even though fear of failure cannot be eradicated from such environments, it can be managed, even put to work as a source of energy and focus.  Those who are passionately engaged in a task they care about are the ones most likely to achieve success – paradoxically by minimizing thoughts of succeeding, or failing.”

There are so many other good ideas in this book that it is hard to summarize them, but here are a few:

·        In the midst of adversity, we are stronger than we think.  Human beings grow most from situations they try hardest to avoid.

·        Mistakes come from doing, but so does success.  We’re playing it too safe if we don’t fail occasionally.  Effective achievers focus on the task at hand and don’t let the possibility of failure break their concentration.

·        A reluctance to try something new is worse than trying something new that fails.  Generally accepted wisdom is what usually gets us in the most trouble.

·        Progress can be made only when failure is risked.  Failure and setbacks are often learning experiences, a step on the road to success.  Failure is not a disgrace; we should ask ourselves what we learned and them, “Where do we go from here?”

·        Success, which often results in the loss of focus and daring, is at least as hazardous as failure.  Complacency actually costs more than “costly failures.”

·        A company’s inability to move beyond its current success is more often due to lack of vision than lack of opportunity.  Preparing for the future sometimes requires a company to renounce its past.  Success is a moving target; what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow.

·        Employees can’t be told to be innovative; corporate culture must be changed to encourage it.  Intolerance of errors is the Achilles’ heel of overly mature organizations.

I recommend this book.

Before automobile mogul Henry Ford struck gold in the auto industry, he failed twice in previous ventures.

The late chief executive officer of Coca Cola, Roberto Goizueta, presided over one of the greatest blunders in business history when he replaced traditional Coca Cola with a sweeter version, new Coca Cola, an saw his decision summarily rejected by consumers.  But learning from his mistakes, Goizueta went on to build a more prosperous company centered around Coca Cola as a brand, not as a product that sold on the basis of taste.

Those are just two just examples of tremendously successful businessmen who fell flat on their faces.  So were they failures and then successes  Or were their successes a direct outgrowth of their failures?  And what, really, is failure, a shameful episode that marks one as a loser forever or as a risk-taker willing to tolerate setbacks as the cost of great achievement?

“The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate,” said former IBM Chairman Thomas Watson Sr., who used that formula to build a hugely successful company.

A success himself, Champaign [Illinois] native and author Ralph Keyes has been thinking a lot about failure and its virtues.  Now he and co-author Richard Farson have published a book on the subject, Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation, that examines the ups and downs of achievers, the danger of early success, complacency in the face of continued success and the advantages of risking failure.

“It’s really an inquiry.  What does success mean?  What does failure mean?  We write about many instances in which early failure led to later success,” he said …  Keyes is hoping that his latest work, his 11th book, will prove to be popular with more than just the “managers and leaders of all types” who have a specific interest in subjects like this.

“Obviously, the primary market is market managers,” Keyes said.  “But we tried to address broader issues.”

Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

At the moment, investors and politicians are trying to put out the firestorm of corporate crimes that came to light after the Enron collapse.

They are insisting not only on intensive investigations and accounting reforms but punishment of the wrongdoers. In response, the business community has become nervous and fearful. This may turn out to be more damaging than the scandalous behavior itself.

Caution and accountability are replacing the expansiveness that once characterized American business. In the long run, this could be the most destructive consequence of book-cooking by the likes of Enron and WorldCom.

Long before news of corporate scandals broke, Americans were already on an accountability binge. Especially in our schools, but also in other institutions, we have been demanding tests and standards and answerability. The stunning misbehavior of the darlings of our investing public has only intensified that attitude.

As Ambrose Bierce noted almost a century ago, accountability is “the mother of caution.” In a climate of fear, we tend to insist more and more on tests and measures. In the process we become increasingly risk-averse.

Taking risks, however, is precisely what is needed now, more than ever.

Risk is the only avenue to innovation. And the demand for innovation in the current fast-paced, globalized and technologized economy is constant. We need continual innovation in both product and process.

Instead, we are seeing a pulling back, a move toward tightening up, toward making sure no mistakes are made.

Today’s most popular management fad is a quality-control approach known as “six sigma,” a term borrowed from statistics that means that the work done by our business and government institutions must be as close to perfect as possible. No mistakes.

This impulse to seek perfection takes us in the wrong direction, robbing us of what is perhaps our most important national strength: the ability to innovate. Other countries may occasionally have taken markets away from us, but there were always more where those markets came from because we had the power to innovate by taking chances and, in the process, to create new markets.

Mistakes and failure are the inevitable consequences of taking risks. One measure of genuine risk-taking is the amount of failure generated. That’s why IBM’s Thomas Watson Sr. said, “If you want to increase the probability of success, double your failure rate.”

The great innovators from Thomas Edison down to the contemporary entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have operated on the same principle. They understand that failure and success are intimately connected, interdependent, sometimes indistinguishable. One has always led to the other.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates was recently depicted in Fortune magazine as a risk-taker whose success grew from the realization that, in the words of a colleague, “you have to try everything, because the real secret of innovation is to fail fast.”

To allow the current revelations of disgraceful corporate behavior to make us hunker down in a mode of caution could cause us to lose our edge in the highly competitive global economy.

Mike Harden

Ralph Keyes of Yellow Springs, Ohio has co-written the perfect gift for someone who has been fired, laid off or upbraided for concocting a bold new project that tanked. Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation (Free Press, $22) is an anthem to lead balloons, a paean to flops.

“The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate,” said Keyes, quoting Thomas Watson Sr. of IBM.

The writer — who began work on the book three years ago with Richard Farson, author of Management of the Absurd — set out to study how companies deal with innovations that falter.

“3M has a strong failure-tolerant culture,” he noted. “They encourage their people not to be defensive about their failures.”

More than one presumed failure at 3M later turned out to be a success,

Keyes said. “This guy at 3M was trying to develop a really strong adhesive. He came up with a very wimpy adhesive. Then he discovered that, although it was a weak adhesive, it would re-adhere.”

Unsure of what to do, the researcher took the result to a free-for-all brainstorming session called Tech Forum.

A 3M staff member seeking a non-slip, removable marker for a church hymnal thought the adhesive perfect.

Post-it notes were thus created.

Similarly, Scotchgard was developed at 3M after a researcher spilled an experimental fluid on her shoe: The water she used to try to clean up the spill simply beaded.

“So-called accidents,” Keyes said, “have been wholly or partly responsible for products such as Gore-Tex, nylon, Teflon, Silly Putty, penicillin, shatterproof glass and the microwave oven.”

Such inventions evolve because of companies that are willing to make mistakes.

The fear of failure, Keyes suggested, often leads to failure.

“Do you remember Railway Express?” he asked. “If they had had the vision to see the future of air express, they would today be FedEx.

Polaroid, which sought bankruptcy protection in 2001, “did wonderful with instant photography, but they should have looked ahead at digital photography. There is a real danger in relying on what succeeded in the past to build your future.”

The issue isn’t just how companies handle failure but how individuals do, too.

“Country singer Joe Diffie said that the best year of his life was the one in which he lost his job at a foundry, got divorced, totaled his pickup and was audited by the IRS,” Keyes writes.

“With so little to lose, Diffie left Oklahoma for Nashville” — and launched a career in music.

What’s important to understand, Keyes said, is the relativity of both failure and success.

Borrowing from Kipling, he pointed out that triumph and disaster should be approached as impostors.

“In 1929, the year Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury were published, novelist Julia M. Peterkin won the Pulitzer for her now-long-forgotten novel Scarlet Sister Mary.

“Daring leads to loss more often than gain.”

Unfortunately, in tough economic times, daring is sometimes replaced by caution and wariness.

The willingness to take risks goes out the window.

Failure is part of the game, said Keyes, quoting NBA star Michael Jordan:

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life.

“And that is why I succeed.”

by Robin Grugal

Inspiration for great ideas is all around us – not hidden in shadowy recesses, but right there in plain sight. All it requires is for us to see the obvious with fresh eyes. Easier said than done? Sure, it’s in our nature to overlook what we take for granted. But it’s worth making a conscious effort to be more observant in our everyday lives. Amazingly enough, billions of tea drinkers observed the force of steam escaping from water boiling in a kettle before James Watt realized that this vapor could be converted into energy. And many scientists and researchers knew bacteria couldn’t live around the penicillium mold, but it took Alexander Fleming to recognize that the mold killed bacteria and could potentially be used to fight infection, giving birth to the field of antibiotics. The Eyes Of Children “Those who see what’s obvious aren’t necessarily brighter than others. They’re just more likely to observe that the emperor is naked. Like children, they see what’s actually there. Their perceptions are less clouded by belief systems, taboos, habits of thought,” said authors Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes of Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins. Consider the case of Swiss engineer George de Mestral, the father of Velcro. He found an alternative to the zipper by observing nature. His story began one night in 1948, when he and his wife were about to go to dinner and she became frustrated by a stubborn zipper on her dress. She wondered if there might be another way to secure fabrics. A few weeks later, de Mestral took his dog for a walk through the forest. On his return, he noticed burrs on the dog’s coat and thought he would look at one under a microscope. The surface consisted of tiny hooks, and he noticed that they stuck to tiny loops in his clothing. He wondered if the principle of tiny hooks and loops could be made into a product.  It took him eight years to devise a cheap and simple way to make large quantities of the fasteners, making one strip soft and fuzzy (loops) and the other with tiny hooks. He finally succeeded and made millions of dollars in royalties. Oddly enough, nobody before de Mestral thought about the adhesive qualities of those annoying little burrs. And it wasn’t for a lack of analysis. The herb that produces these burrs, called burdock, had long been valued for its medicinal properties, said Steven Strauss in “The Big Idea.” Then there’s the case of Ermal Fraze, the inventor of the first self-contained, ring-pull drink opener. Back in 1959, he was at a picnic and wanted to open his drink can, but couldn’t find a can opener with a triangular pointed edge. So he used a car bumper to get it open. The result was a lot of foam and frustration. Fraze, a toolmaker, went down to his workshop one night and tinkered until he came up with the basic principles of the ring-pull can. The idea became the standard for soda and beer cans for nearly two decades. The push-in and fold-back version replaced it in 1977.

Mike Leonard

You’ve completed your course work, snatched up your diplomas and hit up all of your parents’ friends for graduation gifts.

You’ve also probably heard more advice and inspirational words than you can stomach, although if someone sidled up to you and said, knowingly, “plastics,” that was worth a belly laugh, even if you didn’t get the reference from the 1967 film The Graduate.

Now, if you really want to know something that will help you as you get on with your lives and your careers, pay heed to what Ralph Keyes has to say: “Now get out there and fail!”

Keyes and co-author Richard Farson recently published a book titled Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation. In it, they argue quite persuasively that failure not only is an unavoidable fact of life but, probably, the engine that drives success.

“If we’re trying to do anything with this book, it’s to destigmatize failure and to suggest that the worst way to achieve success is to pursue success and avoid failure,” Keyes said last week from his Yellow Springs, Ohio, home.

“That’s a very hard message to sell in this society because we’re so success-oriented,” the eclectic author explained. “It seems like every other book you see has success in its title. Dress for Success. Ten Ways to Success.”

The authors cite dozens of examples of failures that led to successes and quote a variety of successful people who also believe in the failure-breeds-success model. One of the most ridiculed business initiatives in recent times was the Coca-Cola Co.’s decision to change its formula to create New Coke, for example.

Yes, New Coke was an extraordinary flop. But, the authors argue, the failure taught the company that its value was in its brand, not its formula. Coke rebounded to increase its market share, wiser for the lessons learned in failure.

A Yale student named Fred Smith earned a C — not exactly a failure but close in the Ivy League culture — for a paper proposing an overnight delivery service. Smith’s professor dismissed his thesis as implausible. Smith took his idea forward after college anyway and created a company called Federal Express.

The great inventor Charles Kettering once said, “Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. One fails toward success.” Henry Ford called failure “the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” And the man who made IBM the dominant force in the computer world for many years, Thomas Watson Sr., said, “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”

“Among the startup people in Silicon Valley, there is almost a failure chic,” Keyes pointed out. “One guy will say, “I’ve gone belly-up twice and the next guy will say, ‘Well, I’ve gone bankrupt six times.’”

The point is that big or innovative ideas would never get off the ground if people weren’t afraid to fail. “It’s one reason our economy is so vibrant compared to older economies such as those in Europe,” Keyes said. “To take a chance and fail is one of the worst things that can happen to you in those systems.”

Indeed, when Congress tightened up bankruptcy laws at the urging of the Bush administration last year, many economists argued that the measures would only discourage the kind of cutting-edge innovation that made the United States an economic giant in the first place.

Keyes says the fear of failure paradigm also applies in the sports world. “Look at the Winter Olympics. Michelle Kwan was clearly going for the gold and it made her tense and somewhat rigid,” Keyes said. “Sarah Hughes wasn’t thought to have a chance for the gold and she skated wonderfully because she wasn’t carrying the fear of failure that hampered Kwan.”

Keyes believes that the FBI’s recent problems can be attributed in part to an institutional culture that held on to structures and methods that had been successful in the past. “They enjoyed so much success catching bank robbers and the like that they saw no reason to restructure themselves to better handle intelligence and the challenges of the modern world,” he said.

All of this also applies to recent graduates of high school or college, Keyes said. “I think schools have a very bad success-failure model. You succeed or fail. You got a good grade or a bad grade. And if you got a bad grade, you’re a failure.

“What we’re trying to propose is the question, ‘Is the distinction between success and failure that clear?’ It isn’t in real life. We can all look back at our own lives and see times that seemed like setbacks to us but actually pushed us in a new direction that led to some success.”

As has often been pointed out, Microsoft’s Bill Gates was a Harvard drop-out. And David Letterman endowed a scholarship at his alma mater, Ball State, specifying that it should go to reward creativity and not grade point average.

“Actually,” Keyes said, “it’s fairly surprising to see how often the best students in high school or college do not go on to become the most accomplished citizens later in life.”

From the book Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes

Wins, by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

Marilyn’s “Must” Reads (Machlowitz Consultants, Inc.)

Stern & Associates (HR Consulting)

Contrarian food for thought.

Trying to meet a father’s expectations.

Learning not to touch one’s father affectionately, replacing hugs and kisses with manly handshakes.

Competing with one’s father, especially in sports.

Trying to accomplish what one’s father couldn’t, either at his behest or with his resistance.

Realizing gradually the terrible price fathers pay to be “good providers.”

…if the writers in Keyes’s collection are any indication, even those fathers who are intimately involved in their children’s lives are facing their own struggle — trying to be there in a way their own fathers might not have been, trying to become the role models they might have missed.

E. Stephens, The Examined Life

Writing for The New Republic Online Gregg Easterbrook finds that “whether something is believed has become more important than whether it’s true.” As evidence, Easterbrook introduces us to The Post-Truth Era, a new book by Ralph Keyes. In an article (requires registration) that touches on the recent presidential debates, LBJ, Jesse Ventura, Jacques Derrida, and Werner Heisnberg, Easterbrook grapples with the new American appetite for lies.

—Kenneth Tanner, Touchstone magazine

Hmmmm. Interesting notion. Certainly seems plausible. Of course, being a walking paragon of virtue, I don’t do any such thing. But now that I know what the rest of you are up to, I’ll be on my guard…

The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, Ralph Keyes (Still on my list, however, I was able to obtain a copy of the book, so now I do not have to forage through my local library.)

thedp.blogspot.com/

Gregg Easterbrook, Tuesday Morning Quarterback on NFL.Com

Sean Buchanan

This is it for me, my last act of participation at Kent State. There’s a lot I’ll miss. There’s also some relief, but no regrets. I’ve found a job, gotten engaged to the love of my life and acquired some massive student loans.

I do hope though that I’ve learned enough to warrant an advice column. Since columns are only 550 words, I just might be able to pull it off.

Major in what you love, not what you think will get you a job. I’ve known I would major in philosophy and English since I was in junior high, and that might be the only thing I was right about then. I’m not saying, “Don’t major in the career-focused areas,” but only do so if you know you want to be an accountant.

Subscribe to a magazine. People who don’t keep up on new developments get boring. Unless you’d like to damn yourself to a life of always talking about you, pick up a magazine about anything you’d like, be it Wire, Harper’s, Bass Weekly or Playboy.

Be as involved as you’d like. One of the greatest things about a large campus like Kent State is that no matter how much time you have or what you’d like to do, there’s a group to participate in. If you’re a soulless resume builder, you can run for Undergraduate Student Senate, or if you like paddling freshman — in a completely heterosexual way of course — you can go greek.

Most importantly, our generation is in a position to understand the world in a new way. According to Ralph Keyes, we’re living in a post-truth era, but that’s not where we need to be. Our generation can take the lessons learned from the French theoreticians of the ’70s and use the history they’ve torn apart to construct a much more honest telling.

We have a panoply of values and beliefs to examine, but just stopping there and proclaiming them all equally valuable is pointless. Bruno Latour laid out a project for criticism that is akin to the project of our generation: using criticism to add to the knowledge in the world rather than taking it away. For example, when we teach American history, we tend to fall into the trap of evaluating the founding fathers as heroes or just a new brand of slave holders. But we can’t just settle for the apple pie or the rotten apples. We need to delve and continue to delve, tossing out the bad and refining the merely OK to get the best possible knowledge.

We owe a fundamental debt to honesty as a value. There’s no question we’ve lost that value in many ways. Cultural relativism certainly hasn’t helped. But by keeping an open mind, yet constantly critical and discerning, we can be honest without cruelty.

There are lazy thinkers out there who will use this for cheap relativism, like the white males who consider themselves a victimized minority or those who think moral values justify their hatred. But building a just world and a just future depends on them losing.

And remember, the doors in the Student Center always open on the side of the KSU seal. Don’t push the wrong side of the door …

Susan DeBow

I assume part of the purpose for the debates by the presidential and vice-presidential candidates is to give voters clarity as to the positions of the candidates. This is a worthy idea. Unfortunately for me, all it is doing is making me dread Nov. 2.

After seeing and hearing the candidates discuss what they believe, all I can say is, I’m having a hard time believing anyone.

As a person trying to be a good citizen, I feel it is my obligation to vote. And I will. But I can’t begin to tell you the nauseous feeling I get when I think of casting my vote for either the Bush/Cheney or Kerry/Edwards ticket. And it galls me that while I can go to the store and choose from 125 kinds of salad dressings, when I go to cast my ballot for a decision decidedly more important than ranch or blue cheese I am forced to select from only two parties. Instead of feeling like I am supporting the system, I feel as though I’m being held a prisoner to it.

How in the world can a voter be expected to choose a president in an election where “the truth” is only a manipulation used to further an agenda? The candidates accuse each another of lying. They throw numbers and supposed “facts” around that none of us can believe.

Now, a fact seems to be anything anyone believes to be true, a conclusion that has been brought into being by manipulating evidence, a piece of information that often is taken out of context and thrown around with an air of moral supremacy and indignation, only to be countered by a retaliatory “fact” that has been has been thrown together to trump the opponent’s fact.

The debate is mud wrestling without the entertainment value of having real mud. And I am up to my armpits in muck, trying to wade through the half-truths, spin and crocheted facts.

Who do I vote for when I believe that Iraq has been mishandled by the current administration? How do I get rid of the nagging thought that there was a personal agenda this administration had when it abruptly turned from Afghanistan to Iraq? Is what I feel more truthful than what I’m being told? How do I vote for a candidate who I believe doesn’t really have a total understanding of the way the world operates these days? And who has, no matter what he has said in the debates, changed his stance on the war more times than Joan Rivers has changed faces — yet won’t admit it?

Who do I vote for when I believe that after 9-11 a golden opportunity was cast aside by the incumbent to bring this country together by having us work together to become energy self-sufficient, to actually do some soul-searching as to who we are as a country and as individuals, to make sure that we are building a better America?

Yet how do I vote for a candidate who says he will be tough on terrorists, when he valued his job on the Senate Intelligence Committee so little that he missed 76 percent of the meetings during his time on the committee from 1993-2000? How do I believe a man who has belittled the leader of Iraq so badly?

How do I choose between two candidates, neither of whom I believe understands my belief that the educational system in this country needs to be revamped and the success of our children’s education begins with parent accountability? One candidate says that our education system is better and one says it is worse?

How am I supposed to figure out who to vote for when it comes to jobs and the economy when the candidates don’t compare apples with apples? One candidate says that our economy is a mess. The other says it is rosy, robust and growing. How is a voter supposed to know who is telling the truth?

Perhaps why I’m having such a difficult time is that for the first time in my voting life, we’re living in what author Ralph Keyes calls a “post-truth era,” where, unfortunately, fact and fiction, truth and lies and spin are designed to capture us in a web.

Growing up we had a saying, “Liar, liar pants on fire.”

So I guess, as a voter, I guess I’ll end up casting my vote for the candidate whose pants don’t go up in flames.

Robin Summerfield

He traveled a lot for business. Curious thing, though — his bags never had any airline tags. He told his wife of 30 years that he ripped them off at the airport and threw them away before coming home.

“Nobody does that,” says private investigator Ali Wirsche, who discovered the man was living a secret life with another woman in Calgary. “The double life is very confusing,” says Wirsche. “They tell so many lies they can’t remember their lies anymore.” Are we lying more these days or does it just seem that way? And does it really matter either way?

Spouses cheat, job seekers pad their resumes, Internet daters inflate their profiles, shoppers taste grapes in the grocery store and flatterers say, “Gee, that shirt looks really good on you.” Those lies can range from harmless fibs to whoppers that destroy marriages, take down corporations, empty retirement funds or put Martha in the big house.

In a 10-minute conversation, 60 per cent of people will tell an average of three lies or untruths, U.S. psychology researcher Robert Feldman found.

“It’s hard not to feel there’s a lot of lying going on,” says author Ralph Keyes, whose book The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (St. Martin’s Press) hits shelves this October.

Keyes began his search for the truth behind lying about three years ago; he felt the increase of electronic media such as the Internet, e-mail and 24-hour cable, was leading to a flood of deception.

“What we may think of as an epidemic of lies may actually be an epidemic of the discovery of old lies,” Keyes says. “Lies are like cockroaches. You see one, you’re bound to see more.”

Instead of lying, we shave the truth, we spin, we contextualize, we’re lenient with honesty, we’re economical with the truth or we just exercise bad judgment, says Keyes, rattling off his favourite list of euphemisms for lying.

So why are we fudging the truth so freely?

Modern life with its increased mobility, anonymity and inherent loss of community is at the root, Keyes surmises. The Internet is also to blame, but while the anonymity of e- mail and the Web encourages consequence-free dishonesty, that same modern tool can out liars much easier, Keyes says from his base in Yellow Springs, Ohio, near Dayton.

One Google search and a past whopper can easily be revealed. But that still doesn’t deter people because “recreational lying” — weaving a tale and getting away with it — can be “a lot more entertaining than telling the truth,” says Keyes. “The problem today is not that we tell lies, it is that we tell lies promiscuously and without thinking about it,” he says. “There’s a casualness of today’s lies. Deception is a way of life.”

That way of life can also bring rewards, as evinced in popular culture. New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for faking stories from his apartment in Brooklyn. The lies initially made him a star in a highly competitive environment; after he was exposed, his story earned him a juicy book deal, although Burning Down My Master’s House tanked in sales. He’s not the only writer recently caught fabricating stories: among them are The Boston Globe’s Patricia Smith, National Post’s Brad Evenson, USA Today’s Jack Kelley and the New Republic’s Stephen Glass, who turned his mendacious misadventures into a bestselling book and movie, The Fabulist. Even Alberta Premier Ralph Klein was accused of plagiarizing from the Internet for a university term paper earlier this year. He was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Publicly unearthing lies and outing the liars has become its own money-making industry. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a two-hour-plus assault on George W. Bush’s administration and the path to war post-Sept. 11. The film — which systematically attacks the U.S. president’s personal motivations for the Iraq war, decision by decision — made $100 million US in its first six weeks of release in the States and won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Former Saturday Night Live writer and performer, satirist and radio show host Al Franken’s latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them, takes on what he calls a “liberal media bias myth,” deconstructing right-wing arguments and attacks on Democrats. The book is a bestseller.

Lying is not just for the famous and the infamous. “Lying is extremely pervasive and it’s something we see a lot of in everyday conversation,” says Feldman, a psychology professor and researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And we’re not very good at determining when people are lying to us or not.” The expert on lying has discovered that liars will blink their eyes more, could break into a sweat, fidget, look around and break eye contact. Those same cues, however, are seen when people are nervous or anxious for a host of other reasons.

Feldman does clear up one misconception about liars. Both sexes lie about the same amount, but for different reasons, he discovered. Women will lie more often to spare feelings or protect others, while men lie to pump themselves up, Feldman says. His latest research looks at the effect and response of being lied to. Preliminary results have found the victim begins returning the lies to the victimizer after they discover the deception.

Without question lying, has consequences. Just ask Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. His Vietnam service record has been relentlessly attacked in the past few weeks by a group of veterans. While the claims have been discredited, damage has been done. A Los Angeles Times survey published Thursday shows Bush leading the presidential race, capturing 49 per cent of registered voters compared to Kerry’s 46 per cent, marking the first time the U.S. president has pulled ahead of his competitor this year, the newspaper reported.

In private life, people lie to protect others, spare feelings, inflate their self-worth, pursue their own self-interests and outright deceive for deception’s sake. The truth can be bent, but not broken. So when is lying OK — or is it ever? “It’s a question of morality. Society makes these judgments,” Feldman says.

Some lies are told for self-preservation, however misguided it may be. Athletes, such as the Greek Olympic track stars who made headlines last week, might lie about using performance-enhancing drugs. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton clung to power by claiming that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Even Martha Stewart, who has been convicted of lying about a stock trade to investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, still claims she’s done nothing wrong.

Others lie out of a need for self aggrandizement. Former Lethbridge alderman Dar Heatherington — who went missing on a political junket in Montana last year and was found days later walking in Las Vegas dazed and confused — was found guilty of making up her imaginary stalker. She will be sentenced in September.

“People use lying to justify promoting their own self interests,” says Calgary ethicist Sinclair MacRae. In business, Enron executives fudged finances. The company and its retirement fund imploded and thousands lost their jobs. In Canada, Calgary exploration company Bre-X told investors there was gold in them thar hills, and lots of it. There wasn’t. Investors lost their shirts as the stock price plummeted.

Lying is not one act, with clearly defined boundaries, MacRae says. It can range from posturing to deception to telling outright falsehoods to letting people draw false inferences from words or actions. “There’s nothing in the acts that make one better or worse than the other,” says the Mount Royal College professor. “Ultimately, it depends on the harm done.”

Some of the most damaging lies involve adultery, which is why Calgary P.I. Wirsche and her partner Marnie Milot are never short of clients. In the business for 10 years, the Calgarians have heard every lie. With so many falsehoods flying, Wirsche and Milot came up with a Top 20 Lies List. (The list will appear in their latest book, Sex, Lies and P.I.s, to be published in Spring 2005.)

Among the whoppers most commonly told:

- I found that hotel key on the sidewalk and I haven’t had time to return it.

- I bought that contraceptive foam by mistake.

- That condom wrapper in my car blew in the open window.

- It must have dropped out of the mechanic’s pocket.

- That blond hair must be the mechanic’s.

“Those poor mechanics,” Wirsche says.

Even with all the lying going on around her, the investigator warns would-be cheaters against embarking on relationships built on lies. “You should watch your back, because we could be watching you.”

Mike Leonard

Reggie Fowler, the man attempting to buy the Minnesota Vikings, had enough lies on his resume to make a con artist blush, but his bid to become an NFL owner remains on track.

The prevailing attitude seems to be, so what if he put a generous amount of frosting on that cake? Everybody does it.

When University of Colorado scholar Ward Churchill came under fire for saying that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. civilian targets were basically justified, research revealed a number of distortions and exaggerations in his scholarship and background – including the fact he isn’t a Native American, as he’d always suggested, but an honorary one.

Churchill seemed neither shamed nor repentant when he appeared last week on HBO’s popular “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Quite the opposite, in fact.

Ralph Keyes of Yellow Springs, Ohio, refers to both situations as merely the most recent examples of the greater thesis he takes on in his newest book, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life.

“I’ve been intrigued for at least the last couple of decades with the number of people I call imposeurs – people pretending to be something more than they are,” the author said in a phone interview last week.

“I love Fowler’s response to all of this: ‘I realize there is some confusion surrounding my background.’ If that’s not post-truthfulness, what is?”

Keyes examines everything from the religious underpinnings to the morality of truthfulness to the various examples of distortions and misrepresentations of the truth in everyday life and concludes, “There’s a whole lot of lyin’ going on.”

“Actually, I was kind of surprised when I went back and read early theology on this issue. There’s always an out in any body of ethics, outside of Immanuel Kant and St. Augustine, who took a more extreme view. But the idea of all religions saying that all lying is wrong is simply untrue. There are always outs.”

There are big lies and little lies, of course. And the way we accept the little lies could be one reason that people seem to have an increasingly difficult time figuring out where various shades of dishonesty fit on the spectrum.

Little lies that most of us tell regularly include voice-mail messages that say we’re not in when we are. Saying, “I’m fine” when that isn’t really the case. Making up excuses instead of leveling with people.

Fowler, the prospective NFL owner, said he’d played for the Cincinnati Bengals and Calgary Stampeders when, in fact, he’d only attended training camps. He said he graduated from the University of Wyoming in business when he actually majored in social work.

“I was talking to a guy only recently who said he went to college with his best friend from childhood and they roomed together for two weeks before they decided it wasn’t going to work out,” Keyes said. “They were like a truth squad for each other, and whenever one of them started exaggerating to impress people, the other guy would call him on it. They decided that was no fun. It was easier to hang out with people who didn’t grow up with you so you would be free to embellish.”

Politicians prevaricate so much it makes it difficult for people to even know where to draw the line on the difference between lying and playing politics. Bill Clinton tried to dance around participation in an extramarital sexual affair by narrowly, and most would agree, disingenuously, defining the meaning of the word “sex.” George W. Bush distorts the implications of his programs and policies by giving them positive-sounding names that no one could quibble with, if true. And Ronald Reagan sometimes described his movie roles as experiences he’d actually had, often putting him in places he never visited.

“I think lying is definitely a bipartisan activity,” Keyes said. “But in general, Democrats seem more prone to tell fibs about themselves, like Clinton and Gore did, and Republicans are more likely to use deception on policy issues and what they’re really up to, like why we invaded Iraq, or whether the clear skies or healthy forests initiatives will deliver what they say they will or whether they’re just programs that further the interests of energy companies and logging interests.”

Keyes said, especially with respect to the personal lying and embellishments that most people engage in, it would seem our mobile society plays a role. Now that most of us don’t grow up in one community and stay there, we don’t have the same sense that we’ll get caught when we make our stories a little more interesting.

Religion, even with its exceptions for acceptable lies, seems to have been replaced with a therapeutic model, Keyes theorized. “If someone tells a lie, we say he’s in denial. Therapists will say it’s not my job to expose lies in my patients. My job is to find out how my patient really feels about things.”

The Post Truth Era is a fascinating book because Keyes wrote it with a solid journalistic approach. From the little lies he discusses to the big ones, there is no denying that what he writes is accurate.

What it all means is the big question.

“I’m not trying to be up on a pulpit and say shame on you liars. I’m a sinner. I’m not always as truthful as I wish I was,” he said.

“More than anything, I’m just trying to engage the public in a debate we ought to have. Have we slipped into being dishonest on too casual a basis? And when people do lie, does it bother anyone that there often are no sanctions whatsoever as a consequence?”

Jim Dey

In his memoir, Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, cast himself as the hero in confrontations with members of Congress during public hears on Capitol Hill.  After a magazine reporter checked videotapes and transcripts of the hearings and found the heated battles that Reich had described never happened, Reich defended his misrepresentations by maintaining that “I was absolutely true to my memory.”

Fired from The New York Times for fabricating facts and events in news stories, reporter Jayson Blair defended his falsehoods as justified because of his grievances against the newspaper.  He was rewarded with a six-figure contract to write a book on his misadventures at the Times.

Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu became a hero among certain segments of the academic community when she wrote an autobiography about growing up under oppression in Guatemala.  But when Menchu later conceded that major portions of her book were fabricated, her defenders in academia said they would continue to make it required reading for their students because her story represented a larger truth.

“Whether her book is true or not, I don’t care,” said a professor at Wellesley College.

Misrepresentations — lies to be more blunt — have long been a staple of life, whether in show business, politics, academia, journalism or routine interactions among people.  But what’s become increasingly common in recent years is the tolerance that society shows not only for admitted liars but acceptance of their falsehoods as not necessarily false.

At least, that’s the contention of author Ralph Keyes, a former Champaign resident whose latest book is titled The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life.  Noting continued episodes of deceit, Keyes said he has been struck by society’s reaction to liars and their lies.

“The main (point) is saying, ‘Maybe we’ve become too fib-friendly,’ he said.  “As long as there is no penalty for the transgression, we’ll continue to have a post-truth society.”

Keyes, of course, is not surprised that people from all walks of life say things that aren’t true.  Whether it’s to impress people, make a sale or get out of trouble, people have been telling lies since the beginning of time.

What’s changed, Keyes contends, is the willingness of certain segments of society to label falsehoods as either “spinning,” “poetic truth,” or “nearly true,” depending on how they feel about the individual’s political or social causes.

“We’re pretty clever at coming up with all these rationales.  But we’re really losing our grip on the difference between truth and lies, between honesty and dishonesty,” he said.

Keyes said the issue sometimes boils down to this: “My guy’s lie is understandable, but your guy’s lies are reprehensible.

People lie for a variety of reasons, sometimes just to impress others.

The noted historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Ellis regaled his students at Mt. Holyoke College with his adventures as combat soldier, football hero and civil rights activist, none of which was true.  After Ellis’s falsehoods were revealed in the Boston Globe, Mt. Holyoke’s president defended Ellis’s misconduct until public criticism forced her to suspend Ellis from the faculty for a year.

Ellis ultimately paid a high price for his transgression, but that’s not always the case.

Fired from The Boston Globe for fabricating stories, columnist Mike Barnicle quickly landed work as a columnist elsewhere as well as a radio/TV commentator.  Had Barnicle had lesser stature than that of a well-known columnist, his journalistic career would have been over.  But influential personal friends helped the colorful Barnicle resurrect his career.

Politicians, not surprisingly, are among the worst liars, with offenders coming from the ranks of both Republicans and Democrats.  But any offense taken at their misrepresentations often is divided on partisan lines.

Keyes’s latest book is his 13th.  He has worked as a freelance writer since 1970, a perilous career path because of the irregularity of income.

“People ask what the secret is to being a freelance writer, and I say, ‘A wife with a steady job,’” he said.  “Freelance writing is a very odd and harrowing way to make a living.  I don’t recommend it, although I enjoy it.”

Now 59, Keyes grew up in Champaign-Urbana, the son of university professor Scott Keyes and Charlotte Keyes, a writer.  He graduated from Champaign High School in 1962 and went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he soon met the woman who became his wife. After living in various places across the United States, Keyes, his wife and two sons moved back to Yellow Springs in 1990.

Although he’s primarily an author of books, Keyes said he also supports himself by public speaking and teaching, mostly on topics about which he’s written books.

Keyes said his latest book has been well received, particularly in religious circles, even though the book is is not religious in nature.

“I think they see this as something that ties into messages (of honesty and morality) that they’re trying to convey,” he said.

Keyes said he has not seen much evidence that society is changing its tolerance for prominent people telling lies.  But he described the Internet as a tool that can and is being used to expose that kind of dishonesty, something he said might deter people from lying.

“It’s a great fact-checker,” he said.

Although he contemplated the project for years, Keyes said it actually took him about two years to research and write.  He’s now working on a couple of other projects that will keep him occupied for the foreseeable future.

Keyes said he is “looking at the big 6-0″ on Jan. 12, but has no thoughts of retirement.  After all, he said, writers write and if he retired “what would I do?”

Khalid Moss

Few TV viewers younger than 40 probably remember the quiz show To Tell the Truth, which premiered in 1956 and ran, off and on, until 1991.

To Tell the Truth was a model of progressive simplicity. Three contestants claimed to be the same person. Two were lying. Four celebrity panelists questioned the contestants, one by one, then voted for the contestant they believed to be the real person – the one telling the truth. If a shrewd impostor could sell a convincing lie and stump the celebrities, the contestants were rewarded with vigorous applause, generous cash prizes and a home version of the TV show.

In a sense, To Tell the Truth was the nation’s first reality show because the format eerily mimics the way truth has been devalued and lies uplifted in the era of high-definition TV. And just like the quiz show, you have to constantly be on the lookout for real-life impostors whose tools of the trade are smoke and mirrors.

In his latest book, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, (St. Martin’s Press $24.95) Yellow Springs author Ralph Keyes suggests that the spreading of lies, deceptions, fibs and falsehoods has become more infectious in American society than the flu virus. And, he warns, it’s going to take more than a shot of truth serum to fight off the effects of this creeping epidemic.

Whether its the Internet, parents, faith leaders or politicians, people are running untouched into the vortex of deceit because they are not being held accountable for their lies and untruths. In this, his eighth book, Keyes submits that people have become so callous and disconnected that lying has become inextricably wedged into the craw of the American experience.

A 1966 Antioch College grad who calls himself a “mom-andpop sociologist,” Keyes theorizes that in this volatile cultural mix where humans are displaced, confused and sorely lacking in a sense of community, we no longer feel compelled to be honest with each other.

“There are two basic reasons not to lie,” said Keyes between sips of bottled water in the living room of his smart Yellow Springs bungalow. “One is because it’s wrong. That’s the internal reason – your conscience. The second is that you might get caught. This could cause problems with the people you’re connected to in a tribe, village or a small community like this one. But since so few of us live in those kind of environments, you are left with conscience. I don’t believe conscience or ethics alone are strong enough to keep us from putting each other on.”

Statistics on lying are difficult to track, and harder to swallow. Studies based in part on information at the 2000 Census Web site and the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that most people lie once or twice a day and deceive more than 30 folks a week. (“You look great in that dress!” “I don’t do drugs.” “Sure, I love raw fish!”)

One hundred percent of dating couples surveyed lied to each other in a third of their interactions, and college students lie in 50 percent of conversations with their parents. According to the IRS, more than 10 million people lie on their tax forms and, more astonishingly, we are lied to more than 200 times each day.

Honesty and dishonesty, says Keyes, are practical and functional. There is no scientific evidence to support the theory that the human genome is programmed to tell the truth.

“We have no natural tendency to be truthful or to lie,” he explained. “Earliest societies were small, tightly knit groups where lying was considered dysfunctional. It would have been impossible to sustain trust within such a self-fulfilling group if people could not be truthful. Earliest ethics said you had to be honest to your own kind. But strangers were another ball of wax. All bets were off. Early ethics had nothing to do with strangers or people outside your immediate clan.

“It wasn’t until St. Augustine (born in 340 A.D.) and philosopher Emmanuel Kant that lying became ethically wrong. We think of Kant as having a pure ethic that said you should never lie because it’s wrong. But he was much more practical. If you read his reasons for saying you shouldn’t lie, it’s because, ‘Lying would make a modern society impossible.’ ”

Despite tragic lapses in truth and honesty, modern society has managed to muddle along due, in part, to its faith systems. The Ten Commandments don’t specify lying as a sin, but Exodus 20:16 says, “You should not bear false witness against your neighbor,” and in Revelation 21: 7-8, people who lie, “shall find themselves in the lake of fire which is the second death.”

Keyes observed that each religion has its own concept of truth.

“The basic approach in every religion is that honesty is the best policy. To be dishonest is to forsake the Lord,” Keyes said. “And yet each religion has exceptions that reflect that religion. Islam has certain exceptions that Muhammad laid out, Judaism has certain exceptions and Christianity has certain exceptions. The problem is when you get into the exceptions. Who decides what the exceptions are?

“I think we all tell lies, and it has nothing to do with our personal religious faith. But to the degree that we can minimize those occasions, to the degree that we can be thoughtful and mindful when we are about to tell a lie, that to me is the key.

“I conclude, in The Post Truth Era, that, more than a moral or spiritual revival, what we need in our country is a stronger emphasis on personal human connections. The more we feel tied to each other, the less likely we are to tell each other lies.”

Richard Louv

On Tuesday, at approximately 6:40 a.m., the Diebold optical scanner didn’t like what it tasted. The machine regurgitated the first ballot, and the second, and the third, and more after that.

“Maybe it’s actually a shredder,” one of my fellow poll workers said.

Using the registrar-provided mobile phone, I tried to call the registrar’s troubleshooter hotline. “Due to high volume, we cannot answer your call now,” a recorded voice answered. “Please try back again later.”

“They should have outsourced tech support,” said another poll worker.

“How do you know they didn’t?” someone asked.

With a little faith-based finesse and divine intervention, the scanner finally proved workable. The morning improved. So did our mood.

This was my first experience as a poll worker. A neighbor had nominated me. When I tried to wiggle out of the job, my wife suggested that I should practice what I preach. So at 6:30 a.m., I had slouched toward this corner house a few blocks from my house, its garage door open, where I have voted for a decade.

Ever wonder why most poll workers seem to be getting on in years? The reason is the job ages you. A veteran poll worker advised, “It’s a short day. The first 100 hours are the longest.”

These citizens pursued their duties with scrupulous efficiency, handling the ballots with the care a trucker might take with cases of nitroglycerin. We may no longer trust the election process, but don’t blame the poll workers.

They may be last honest folks standing. Or sitting.

In The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, Ralph Keyes, a former San Diegan, argues deception has become the American way of life. We lie, he says, often with no real reason. According to one study, 28 percent of conversations among friends contained conscious lies; 77 percent among strangers.

“In the post-truth era, we don’t just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie,” he argues. “Enhanced truth, it might be called. Neo-truth. Soft truth. Faux truth. Truth lite.”

Sounds like the 2004 presidential campaign to me. By Keyes’s measure, we get the campaigns we deserve. The professionally packaged, enhanced neo-truths of this campaign were small acts of domestic terrorism. The first casualty of lies – in a campaign or a home — is trust.

Welcome to the post-trust society.

As the polling check-in assistant, I helped voters sign in. My instructions, provided by the official poll worker election guide, were to ask each voter for his or her name and address; in most cases, no ID would be required or requested. Yet, voter after voter whipped out a driver license or military ID.

“Do they always show you their ID?” I asked my poll captain, who has been hosting polling in her garage for over three decades.

“They didn’t used to. Not this much.”

She said the trend started a couple years ago, and increases with every election. This election, at least half of the voters produced  their IDs without being asked. What’s going on here? Perhaps they’ve heard so much about voter intimidation and suppression that they assume they’ll be carded.

Here’s another, more troubling, possibility. Since 9/11, Americans have become accustomed – too accustomed — to producing their IDs, especially if they travel frequently. New, post-trust products help us do this. Recently, I bought a wallet with a see-through pocket on its outer surface, enabling me to show my ID quickly. Security is a good thing, most of the time. But a conditioned reflex to produce an ID without being asked is not.

In the post-trust society, we’re guilty until proven innocent.

Current punditry holds that Bush triumphed because he attracted the so-called morality vote – voters appalled by gay marriage, stem cell research, and abortion. By this view, it’s not “the economy, stupid,” it’s “the morality, heathen.” I have trouble with this suddenly-popular analysis.

It suggests that people who voted for Kerry are not equally committed to morality, or that moral arguments cannot be made on both sides of these issues. It also neglects to mention the moral reasoning or religious sensibility that objects to a foreign policy that has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq, or policies that neglect the hunger and hurt of the least of our own citizens.

A more precise analysis might be: it’s the traditions, friend.

During a time of fear, technological change and lack of trust, people don’t like their traditions messed with, whether it’s the traditional definition of marriage, a cross on a hill, or the way they vote.

As I helped my fellow poll workers pack up the ballots late Tuesday night, I was impatient and irritated. I wanted to be home watching the election results. Then I remembered I was holding the results in my own hands. Slowing down and doing this job right was a matter of trust.

Louv’s column appears on Sundays.

Mike Harden

When Ralph Keyes says his new book on lying in America is doing well, he might be telling the truth.

Then again, Keyes, a Yellow Springs author and social commentator, also implied that it is wise to tell curious journalists that one’s book is 16th on the best-seller lists. The two most-quoted tabulations publicize only the top 15.

Keyes’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press, was wise to bring out The Post-Truth Era in the desperate, dwindling days of a take-no-prisoners presidential race.

“I’ve been doing all of these call-in talk shows,” Keyes said last week. “All anybody wants to talk about is who is the bigger liar, Bush or Kerry.

“The point that fascinates me is the lengths to which voters will go to defend their candidate’s lying. ‘My guy’s lie is understandable, but your guy’s lie is contemptible.’ ”

Lying has become such an immutable part of political vernacular that the only accepted premise in a discussion on the subject is who lies most. “To politicians,” Keyes said, “the question ‘Will it fly?’ is much more important than ‘Is it true?’ ”

The author ventured, “Democrats are more likely to be dishonest about their persona. Republicans, on a broader scale, are more likely to deceive us on policy: their intentions in Iraq, the numbers involved in the tax cut and Medicare benefits.”

Although Democrats have lied through their teeth on matters of great moral consequence — “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” — Keyes said the Dems seem to have a penchant for what he calls “dippy, little lies.”

When Hillary Clinton was introduced to mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary, she boasted that she had been named for him, even though he was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper six years away from Mount Everest and fame when she was born in 1947.

Al Gore kept repeating a story about being sung to sleep in his childhood with a particular union lullaby until it was pointed out that the ditty was not written until he was 27.

Keyes rated Bill Clinton a “genius-grade” flimflammer on marijuana, the military and Monica as well as on small-potatoes prevarications, making one wonder if the former president told the dippy lies to keep in practice for upcoming whoppers.

Keyes said of the current state of lying in America, “In the post-truth era, we don’t just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie. Enhanced truth, it might be called, neo-truth, soft truth, faux truth, truth lite.”

Among his many insights:

* Americans tell an average of 13 lies a week.

* The most common two lies are “I’m fine” and “I’m sorry, I can’t come to the phone right now.” Somewhere in the top 10 is “No, that dress doesn’t make you look fat at all.”

* Men lie to impress; women, to oblige. Wrote Keyes, “Men specialize in self-aggrandizing lies” such as ” ‘I just swung a big deal — huge’; women in charitable ones” like ” ‘Love the dress’ or fibs that are self-protective” including ” ‘I eat mostly low-fat foods.’ ”

* The most commonplace lies often are told to protect the liar as well as the lied to. We answer the offhand inquiry about our health with “I’m fine” because no one wants to know the vivid particulars of irritable bowel syndrome.

In his research, Keyes heard lying euphemized in many ways, though long after the book is history, he likely will recall a psychiatrist who said of a habitually lying patient, “He is someone for whom the truth is temporarily unavailable.”

Mike Harden is a Dispatch columnist

Indeed, dishonesty is our society is so prevalent that the truth-teller is currently at a distinct disadvantage. The witness is a judicial proceeding who tells the truth without embellishment will be discounted, as judges and juries presume that the witness, like all those before them, has exaggerated. Similarly, the job applicant who does not fudge will be rejected, as fudging is now presumed.

Despite its weighty subject, Mr. Keyes’ writing style is engaging. Moreover, the validity of Mr. Keyes’ points are reinforced by everyday life. I highly recommend this book.top

Evan Haglund “elhaglund” (Phoenix, AZ)

When I was four or perhaps five years old I was out on the porch playing with a child’s set of plastic carpenter’s tools with a neighbor child, Curt Tacey.  For reasons lost to history, I took the hammer and clunked Curt on the head with it.  Curt went off and informed his mother of this development, who informed my mother, who came out to consult with me.  Asked how it had come to pass that a hammer had hit Curt on the head, I, thinking quickly, replied: “It fell off the roof.”

I do not know how those of who are reading this column would characterize my statement.  I do, however, strongly suspect how Ralph Keyes, author of the recently published, The Post-Truth Era, would characterize it.  Mr. Keyes, I think, would say that I was lying.

Lying is a wonderful subject, and not given nearly the honest attention it deserves.  Such attention it now receives from Mr. Keyes, whose work to date consists in fair measure of giving intelligent consideration to fairly everyday things – the lifelong effects of one’s high school, or one’s height.  Here, as elsewhere, his approach to the subject is comprehensive, calling upon an extensive body of research and covering lying through history, lying across varied cultures and age groups, and lying by chimpanzees, specifically Koko, the laboratory chimp who having mastered the rudiments of abstract communication immediately began to fib.

There is, of course, a serious core.  While obviously there are no reliable figures to be cited, Mr. Keyes is doubtless correct in asserting that lying is becoming more common.  The rise of moral relativism may make it less clear just what a lie is.  The fragmented nature of our lives might make it seem less likely that a given lie will come back to haunt one.

Mr. Keyes’ book is both pertinent and well-timed.  We have just survived a presidential election in which both campaigns devoted vast expertise to “spinning” each candidate’s remarks, so that voters would not confuse what a candidate actually said with what the candidate actually said.  Indeed, straightforward statement is so rare in public life that when attorney general Janet Reno took responsibility for the fiasco at Waco, she briefly became something of a national hero.  Fiascos, we have plenty of.  But honesty – now that’s news.

All societies, Mr. Keyes writes, have liars, though commonly the opprobrium they attach to lying is conditional.  Lying to an outsider is more tolerable than lying to a member of one’s own people.  Distressingly, he reports that the young women of American Samoa who regaled anthropologist Margaret Mead with impressive tales of sexual frivol were almost certainly putting her, an outsider, on.

Fortunately, he reports, there are substantial bars to lying.  People are less inclined to lie in what they see as the central arena of their lives.  He tells of one potential homebuyer, upset with the transparent dishonesty of the seller, who is startled to learn that the owner has, in his regular business dealings, a splendid reputation for integrity.  Lying in his business dealings would undermine his reputation, a thing that has value in business.  Lying to a homebuyer is, well, free.

In the end, Mr. Keyes’ book becomes an endorsement of the individual – to be known to be as good as one’s word is a remarkably empowering thing – and of the community, which, to the extent it can fairly believe what its members say, has that much less need to regulate and check up on them.  The little boy who cried wolf, after all, eventually came to a point at which he needed others to believe him.  And they didn’t.  That’s wolf, one; boy, nothing, if you’re scoring.

Mark Bernstein

Have we now reached a stage of social evolution that is “beyond honesty?” That fascinating question is raised by author Ralph Keyes in his new book, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. “I think it’s fair to say that honesty is on the ropes,” Keyes observes. “Deception has become commonplace at all levels of contemporary life.”

By the time you finish reading The Post-Truth Era, Keyes is likely to have convinced you that dishonesty is now the order of the day, and that deception has now been institutionalized at virtually every level of American culture.

Keyes is an author of keen perception and wide-ranging observation. He has pulled together an enormous body of evidence, all pointing to the pervasive rise of dishonesty in American life. As Jeremy Campbell remarked in The Liars’ Tale, “It is a creeping assumption at the start of a new millennium that there are things more important than truth.”

Keyes acknowledges that human beings have lied in the past, but he suggests that the current generation of liars has developed a skillfulness and nuance in lying that is virtually unprecedented in the human experience. “Even though there have always been liars, lies have usually been told with hesitation, a dash of anxiety, a bit of guilt, a little shame, at least some sheepishness,” Keyes notes. “Now, clever people that we are, we have come up with rationales for tampering with truth so we can dissemble guilt-free.”

Keyes has a label for this new age of dishonesty. “I call it post-truth. We live in a post-truth era.” Keyes credits the late Steve Tesich with coining this phrase, but Keyes now applies it with vigor to our contemporary culture. “Post-truthfulness exists in an ethical twilight zone,” he explains. “It allows us to dissemble without considering ourselves dishonest. When our behavior conflicts with our values, what we’re most likely to do is reconceive our values.” Since we do not want to think of ourselves as unethical, we simply “devise alternative approaches to morality.”

As evidence of this cultural acceptance of lying, Keyes notes the rise of euphemisms for deception. “We no longer tell lies. Instead we ‘misspeak.’ We ‘exaggerate.’ We ‘exercise poor judgment.’ ‘Mistakes were made,’ we say. The term ‘deceive’ gives way to the more playful ‘spin.’ At worst, saying ‘I wasn’t truthful’ sounds better than ‘I lied’.” Keyes suggests that the use of such euphemisms is a new cultural syndrome he identifies as “euphemasia.” This would include everything from terms such as “credibility gap,” to Winston Churchill’s “terminological inexactitudes.”

What are we to do with terms such as “poetic truth,” “nuanced truth,” “alternative reality,” or “strategic misrepresentations?” In our technological age, driven by a digitalized dimension of lying, we are now accustomed to talking about “virtual truth.”

In a fascinating section, Keyes traces the history of lying. He suggests that early civilizations depended on honesty, at least within the kinship group, for the establishment of stable order and trust. Once society becomes more complicated and diverse, lying becomes more routine. In some cultures, lying to an enemy or a stranger is not considered immoral at all.

In more modern eras, lying was raised to a higher art form. In the history of Protestant confessionalism, creeds were to be accepted “without hesitation or mental reservation.” This language continues among confessional Christians, who may wonder how the term “mental reservation” emerged in the first place.

Keyes supplies this explanation, tracing the use of “mental reservation” back to the Reformation era, when Catholics developed “mental reservation” as a defense for telling an untruth under threat of persecution. “In time, however, it became an easy way to rationalize all manner of prevarication,” Keyes explains. The device of “mental reservation” allowed an individual to hold or “reserve” the truth to himself even as he misled an interrogator. Before long, others used this excuse in order to give apparent assent to creedal statements while privately rejecting the very truths articulated in the statement of faith.

Just how important is honesty, after all? “Honesty’s market value is too little appreciated in the history of ethics,” Keyes argues. “Truth telling underlies not just individual reputations but the health of society as a whole.” Without honesty, there can be no confidence in legal contracts, no shared confidence in social arrangements, and no authority for the rule of law. As argued by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, a healthy society can’t remain healthy so long as it accepts lies. “For a lie always harms another,” Kant asserted, “if not some other particular man, still it harms mankind generally, for it vitiates the source of law itself.”

Is lying a symptom of social pathology? Keyes considers the argument that social dislocation and disconnectedness breed dishonesty. Surveying modern sociological literature, Keyes acknowledges a link between post-truthfulness and the loss of community. “When it comes to post-truthfulness, the fraying of human connections is both cause and effect. Not feeling connected to others makes it easier to lie, which in turn makes it harder to reconnect. Eroded communities foster dishonesty. Dishonesty contributes to the further erosion of communities. As communal bonds wither, unfettered self-interest is unleashed.”

Most of us are largely unaware of the pervasive dishonesty around us–even the dishonesty and deception included in our understanding of the past. Keyes goes after several of America’s most cherished historical legends, demonstrating that many are “apocryphal in whole or in part.” The famous story of George Washington and the cherry tree was invented by a moralistic clergyman, ironically as an argument for honesty.

“Puffery is an art form in the United States,” Keyes asserts. Self-invention becomes a way of climbing the social ladder. Ralph Lifshitz transforms himself into Ralph Lauren, and spawns one of America’s most famous and profitable lifestyle brands. The classical and Anglophile style of Ralph Lauren’s designs would be more awkwardly marketed under the name, Ralph Lifshitz.

Martha Stewart, now serving time in federal prison for lying to federal authorities, is identified by Keyes as one of “the quintessential reinvented Americans.” Unlike Ralph Lauren, who openly acknowledges his origins, Keyes accuses Martha Stewart of going to incredible and extreme effort to hide her humble roots.

In an article written for an early issue of Martha Stewart Living, Stewart wrote an editorial tribute to honesty. “We must remember,” she chided, “–and teach our children (and perhaps our political figures)–one essential; the truth shall make you free.” Nevertheless, Keyes presents a very different picture of America’s domestic adviser. “Martha Stewart routinely misrepresented the type of family she grew up in, her father’s occupation, whom she dated in college, where her roommate was from, what she earned as a model, the size of party she threw, her husband’s ability to father children, how much of her own writing she did, where her home was located (to avoid paying taxes), and why she sold her ImClone stocks.”

In the professional world, resumes are now assumed to be inflated. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown once observed, “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t lie on their resume.” The most pervasive form of “credential inflation” is the listing of unearned degrees. “An estimated half million Americans hold jobs for which their purported qualifications are spurious,” Keyes reports, adding that an investigation conducted by the General Accounting Office once revealed twenty-eight senior federal officials who did not actually hold the college degrees they claimed. Hauntingly, Keyes relates that one personnel official with a hospital told him that job applicants, once informed that their credentials would be checked by a professional firm, sometimes withdrew their applications. Reportedly, nearly a third of those applying for positions took back their applications and never returned.

Making his way through the terrain of deception in American life, Keyes notes that some individuals have become “recreational liars.” They spin tales which are willingly received by some as truths. While this may appear harmless, the practice lowers the credibility of the entire society.

What about the law? According to Black’s Law Dictionary, a “legal fiction” is “an assumption that something is true even though it may be untrue.” In other words, lawyers are obligated, according to the professional standards of the bar, to use whatever argument will work in defending a client, whether or not it is true. In one perverse case, Keyes documents the work of one Florida prosecutor who argued in one courtroom that a pair of teenage boys had killed their father and then entered another courtroom to argue that a family friend–not the teenagers–was the real murderer. “From a strictly legal perspective this was not inconsistent,” Keyes observes, “but it certainly put a spotlight on the contrast between concepts of truthfulness within courts of law and those without.”

Lies are now routinely accepted in political argument and in literature. The line between fiction and nonfiction is now blurry at best. Some recent best-selling titles in the “non-fiction” category have been highly fictional. Does anyone even care?

Keyes identifies the academic world as the source of much confusion when it comes to honesty. Postmodern philosophers routinely dismiss objective truth, and assert that all truth is simply social construction and invention. Authorities in power simply invent truth in order to buttress their authority, the postmodernists allege. Following this logic, lying becomes a means of liberation. As Keyes observes, “Jeremy Campbell exaggerated only slightly when he observed that to a postmodernist, being overly concerned with telling the truth ‘is a sign of depleted resources, a psychological disorder, a character defect, a kind of linguistic anorexia’.”

Debunking the postmodernist worldview, Keyes simply clarifies the obvious: “Asking what constitutes truth is an appropriate topic for intellectual inquiry, but it doesn’t follow that the difficulty of identifying what is objectively true gives us license to tell each other lies.”

The Post-Truth Era offers perceptive analysis of American culture in the new millennium. Without the recovery of truth, this civilization is doomed to a descent into even deeper levels of deception and dishonesty. As a culture, it’s about time we faced the truth about our acceptance of untruthfulness.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

Among the most fascinating things in Ralph Keyes’s The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (St. Martin’s, $24.95) is his look at the ways in which morality and leadership converge. Keyes relates the results of studies by Caroline Keating of Colgate University showing that “an ability to lie was the single best predictor of male dominance. This led her to conclude that, among men at least, the same traits that make a good liar also make a good leader.” This exceptional book asks and answers a diverse series of questions. Do we have a biological predisposition to lie? (Probably.) Do we lie more than our ancestors did? (Maybe.) Do we have a higher tolerance for dishonesty than our ancestors? (Yes.) Can animals lie? (Koko the gorilla certainly did.) Have therapists, politicians, lawyers, postmodernists, Hollywood hustlers, journalists and others played a role in creating a culture of lying? (An extensive one.) Is there any hope for truthfulness? (Yes.) Keyes also provides a brief history of philosophical and theological positions on lying, as well as anthropological data on the practice. He argues convincingly that groups have always found lies to outsiders acceptable but lies to in-group members contemptible. The more impersonal a society becomes, the greater the opportunities for lying, and the fewer the consequences for the individual liar. (This is particularly sobering in today’s Internet-crazed and highly mobile America.) That Keyes can do all this without unleashing a jeremiad or throwing his hands up in despair is extraordinary. Can one make a case for honesty? Keyes does so persuasively, largely because of his willingness to study every good argument — not just the ones that he might support. He tells us that we “could accept every post-modern point about the elusiveness of truth (and even add some), yet still conclude that the attempt to be truthful is not only noble but essential for human well-being.” What about the quotidian lies we tell to lubricate social interaction? We all say, “I’m fine” when we’re not, or tell sick patients, “You look great.” Aren’t these easily justified? Keyes notes that they may do more to make the teller’s life easier than the recipient’s, adding that “any lie — no matter how small — is a vote of no confidence in the person to whom it’s told.” Perhaps his most convincing argument about why we should tell the truth is that, for social creatures, “telling the truth is a way of affirming human ties. . . . Just as lying degrades human connections, truthfulness invigorates them.” Keyes’s book deserves a wide readership. Daniel McMahon

Is all that matters in contemporary culture whether a line sounds good? That’s the thesis of an important, provocative new book, The Post-Truth Era, by Ralph Keyes. It’s Keyes’s thesis that in the current ethos, whether something is believed has become more important than whether it’s true. Keyes cites psychological research showing that people lie far more often than we’d like to think–constantly telling petty lies they think will never be detected and often telling whoppers, even to friends and loved ones. One study showed that 28 percent of conversations among friends contained conscious lies, and 77 percent of conversations between strangers did so. The lies were on matters of substance, not just “your column is good today” and the many similar prevarications intended to avoid hurt feelings.

So perhaps Americans are no longer outraged when politicians lie because we lie so often in our daily lives. Much everyday lying, Keyes says, concerns constructing attractive pasts for ourselves. “I was the quarterback on my high school football team” or “I have a master’s degree” or “I had lots of proposals of marriage” or many other claims along these lines are told both to impress others and to make ourselves feel our own pasts were richer or more accomplished. … Americans like and even admire personal mythmaking and thus don’t seem to object much when political figures lie to puff up their pasts. Lyndon Johnson, for example, constantly told audiences his grandfather died at the Alamo; his grandfather died at home in bed, but an Alamo myth made Texas voters more comfortable with LBJ. Jesse Ventura elaborately claimed to have been a Navy SEAL and to have fought in Vietnam. Keyes contends that neither claim was true–but the mythical Ventura had proven attractive to voters. LBJ and Ventura, it must be noted, came out ahead by presenting personal histories they wished were true.

There are many other examples, and The Post-Truth Era collects dozens, making it an invaluable compendium of the decline of respect for verity in modern culture. Today many would rather watch a docudrama, in which viewers have absolutely no idea what is historical and what is imaginary, than read carefully researched history. The made-up version is more interesting! Many would rather listen to Michael Moore or the Swift Boat guys–Moore on the left and the Swifties on the right being current exemplars of post-truth politics–since the sort of arguments in which it doesn’t matter what is true are more fun than tedious accuracy. The really disturbing trend, Keyes argues, is that so many figures in contemporary politics, literature, journalism, and other fields get away with so much lying about themselves. The public appears to prefer the post-truth version.

Keyes blames the decline of respect for truth partly on intellectual modernism and postmodernism. Intellectuals, he says, crusaded to convince people that there are no absolute truths, that everything is contingent or based on frames of reference. Calamity descended as people actually decided to believe this. Postmodernism’s worst idea has infected popular culture, and now millions of Americans and Europeans believe that nothing is really truth.  … I commend to readers The Post-Truth Era as an antidote.  Gregg Easterbrook

Lying is so much a part of everyday life that everybody does it and everybody expects it, even while polls show Americans long for ethics and integrity in public officials. Keyes examines how we have come to the troubling trend toward the “routinization of dishonesty.” In part one of this fascinating book, he provides a brief history of lying from the medieval ages to the present and explores the reasons behind the decline in ethics. Part two focuses on how modern culture inadvertently promotes lying by downplaying ethical issues while emphasizing emotional health and placing more emphasis on personal, professional, and national myth making. The result is the rise in high-profile liars among journalists, politicians, and corporate executives. Finally, Keyes examines the consequences of a culture that tolerates lying as a “no-fault transgression” with little or no consequences for the liar but a disturbing rise in suspicion throughout the culture. This is a thoughtful, often amusing look at the way we dodge the truth and tolerate dishonesty. Vanessa Bush

Apparently the biggest problem Mr. Keyes faced when writing his book was to get the people he was interviewing admit that they took risks at all. He spoke with skydivers, artists, high-wire walkers, strippers, businessmen and families. Even the wildest stunt or adventure was not deemed ‘risky’ in the eyes of the person doing it.

This sounds strange at first, but consider the fact that we all have choices. What’s riskier – to skydive from an airplane, or to climb a wall of ice? If you choose to look at these activities purely from statistics, they are both safer than driving to work. Do you consider yourself a risk-taker as you drive to work? Probably not. We have convinced ourselves that it is safe.

Herein lies the problem of defining risk. It’s only as risky as you believe it to be. I recently watched a video about extreme skiing. One of the skiers was providing some tips. One was “Don’t listen to other people tell you what you can’t do, because they’re only telling you what they can’t do.”

Risk is personal. An important point in the book was in evolutionary terms. “For 99 percent of human existence, danger, fear and the need to confront fear were our daily companions. We were risk takers because we had to be.” Now we are risk takers as we desire. And to some degree, we all desire risk.

For some, it may be riskier to deal with the guilt of being too scared to do an ice climb, than to actually climb the darned thing. So they take the easy way out and climb it. For others, the concept of climbing ice terrifies them so much, they drive to their favorite ski hill on the most dangerous road in the area and go skiing to forget they ever heard of ice climbing.

Say no more to risk avoiding excuses… Take a moment to consider the risks that you’re already taking in your life. Your career, your relationship, your sports, your pastimes, your education, your future. Whether you think so or not, each decision you have made in each of these areas are all risks.

Ask yourself if taking these risks have made you feel better about yourself, and your control over your life. If the answer is yes, then please make sure you keep taking them. If the answer is no, then take some more and check again. Risks are powerful, and risks are part of your life. Take control. Seize the Day!

- Kevin Thomson

There’s a good book on this whole subject, called The Height of Your Life by Ralph Keyes, in which he talks about the role that height plays in American society.  One chapter goes over how height and romance mix (or don’t mix, as the case may be).  Interesting reading.

I’m currently reading The Height of Your Life by Ralph Keyes, which I’d recommend as a compelling and fun read for anyone interested in the subject of human height …

N.R. Kleinfield

Tom Ferrell

John Leonard

William Safire

William Safire

Edmund Morris

Robert Siegel

Noah Adams

One of my favorite books of recent years is Ralph Keyes’s Is There Life After High School? Keyes wrote the book before the recent outbreak of school killings, and, of course, went to high school decades before such things were contemplated.  But I’d be darned well interested to see what the heck he’d have to say about the modern adolescent society.

… read the excellent book by Ralph Keyes, Is There Life After High School?

Doug Carroll, The Arizona Republic

Doug Carroll, The Arizona Republic, July 4, 2000

Now when I feel the submission (and rejection) blues, which I’m certain I will, I’ll just reach for Mr. Keyes book and at the very least be able to console myself with the fact that, once upon a time, even the blockbuster names we’re all so familiar with had to go through the very same thing

Jill

If any of you are writing book addicts (are all writers or is it just me?) I would strongly recommend you get a copy of The Writer’s Book of Hope by Ralph Keyes. It’s all about the anxiety, frustration and despair that writer’s face every time they sit down to commit words to paper. . The books relates many accounts of the struggles now famous authors had to go through to find success and reminds us that even these successful authors still sit at their keyboard terrified that the words will dry up or that what they are writing is crap. It shows that everyone, whether a first-time novelist or seasoned professional is plagued by frustration that what they actually put on paper doesn’t come up to what they imagine in their head.

The Scribe’s Message Board

Mike Harden

As a champion of the writer’s art, he tries to avoid sounding like a cross between Dr. Phil and the preface of a Chicken Soup anthology.

“There are so many books out there that say all you need to do is meditate, do some affirmations, let your pen follow its course and you’re going to be a writer,” Ralph Keyes said.

The author of a dozen books and a writing instructor for three decades, Keyes, of Yellow Springs, has always endeavored to tread the path of “honest reassurance” that falls somewhere between sadistic Kathy Bates in Misery and “There, there. Everybody is going to be OK.”

Everybody is not going to be OK. Some will be infinitely better Wal-Mart greeters than wordsmiths.

Telling one from another still baffles Keyes, who would politely demur if asked to identify who might most benefit from his newly published The Writer’s Book of Hope: Getting From Frustration to Publication (Henry Holt, $13).

Students who didn’t have a whisper of a chance (in Keyes’ estimation) have published. And, he added, “I’ve had some so committed and so talented, and they end up selling real estate.”

Sorting posers and peacocks from the real producers is made no easier by the aura and allure associated with writing.

“I sometimes think there is nobody out there who is not a closet writer,” Keyes said.

No one ever boasts at a cocktail party, “I’m a frustrated urologist.”

Being an author is “the geek’s version of being a rock star,” Keyes said.

Still, he knows that some of the best-selling books of 2006 are yet a source of unfinished anguish to writers whose names have never crossed the lips of reviewers.

Accordingly, he penned The Writer’s Book of Hope for those writers to whom mornings sometimes begin with a coin-toss decision between pushing on or firing up the paper shredder.

“The hardest part of being a writer is not getting your commas in the right place but getting your head in the right place.”

Part of that process is dealing with discouragers, a topic to which he devotes an entire chapter.

“An Ohio State professor,” Keyes wrote, “told Harlan Ellison that he had no writing talent. By legend, Ellison sent this professor a copy of every one of the dozens of novels he proceeded to publish after dropping out from OSU.”

When, at 26, Margaret Atwood published her first collection of verse, her brother wrote: “Congratulations on publishing your first book of poetry. I used to do that kind of thing myself when I was younger.”

The chapter “Dealing With Discouragers” is immediately followed by one of equal importance, “Exorcising Excuses.”

In the latter, Keyes tries to steer would-be writers away from what he calls the “as-soon-as syndrome”:

As soon as the kids are grown, the dog dies, I leave my husband, I get a better computer or a pristine place to write.

Once it becomes clear that neither one’s dog nor one’s husband is going to die anytime soon, the next hurdle is the all-time bugaboo of scribes: writer’s block.

Keyes suggests using the same approach to writing that has made 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous successful for decades — one page at a time.

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish,” said Keyes, quoting author John Steinbeck. “Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day.”

Lower your standards, he suggests of overcoming writer’s block. He notes that even the immensely gifted Stanley Kunitz has confessed, “The poem in the head is always perfect.”

Ultimately, the best reason to follow Keyes’ advice may be not his 30 years of teaching the craft so much as the simple fact that he has moved on from publishing his 12th book to his 13th.

- Mike Harden is a Dispatch columnist

The book is clearly the result of a lot of research. (Check out the photos on Keyes’ Web site showing the yards of file cabinets in his house.) Keyes doesn’t trot out the tired authors’ anecdotes that we’ve all heard before; he serves up a host of tidbits that were new to me. The quotes by masters (such as Tolstoy) about their lack of “talent” are alone worth the price of the book. I also appreciated Keyes’ no-nonsense tone. I was expecting New Age warmth and fuzziness, but Keyes pulls no punches. Take his observation that some people who give up writing do so not because they lack talent, but because they are uncomfortable spending long periods alone. That’s not a “nice” thing to say, but it’s truthful and important to know.

The Writer’s Book of Hope delivers on its promise. It provides practical hope and inspiration to writers based on a clear-eyed view of the writing profession. It gave me a new lease on my writing life.

Adam Schwartz, Bloomington, IN

The book is full of clear information about subtle and direct discouragers of writing and about the availability of encouragers and where to find them. Keyes tells the writer how to get started, keep going, get help and how to finally find and influence publishers to get your book in print. Chapter titles include “Dealing with Discouragers,” “Exorcizing Excuses,” and “The Publishing Tribe.” Ralph Keyes has been teaching writing for over thirty years while himself publishing ten books and countless articles. The writer henefits from the experience and insight of a person who has watched hundreds of writing projects begin and far fewer achieve completion — and has learned what makes the difference.

Charles J. O’Leary, Ph.D, Arvada, CO

Heybubb, New York City

Bruce Holland Rogers, Toronto, author of Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer

To say that Keyes understands the pain of a writer’s life would be an understatement. He explores every anxiety, every insecurity, every fear you might face, and then helps you get beyond them. Take writer’s block, for example. Keyes blames it on unrealistic expectations. He urges you to accept the fact that your writing will always be imperfect and tells you to get on with it anyway.

Keyes style is to skillfully describe a problem and then present an alternate view, a way of overcoming the obstacle. The book is filled with useful anecdotes and examples taken from real life. Just had your short story rejected? Keyes tells you how Saul Bellow had his stories rejected, even though he’d just won the Nobel Prize for literature. Can’t sell your first novel? Keyes explains how mega-bestselling author John Grisham was forced to peddle his first novel out of the trunk of his Volvo.

The first part of Keyes’ book explains “internal” obstacles to writing: how we stop ourselves through anxiety, frustration and despair. He wants writers to understand that these negative feelings are normal, even among the greatest writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald, after finishing The Great Gatsby, spoke of being “overcome with fears and forebodings.” Gustave Flaubert was completely neurotic while writing Madame Bovary. Alas, neurosis is probably part of every writer’s makeup, but Keyes shows that you can learn to make peace with it.

Keyes also helps you understand the negative feelings you get from other people, people he calls “discouragers.” These are family members, teachers, co-workers and others who think you’re being “unrealistic” by trying to be a writer—the folks who say, “Sure, you’re a writer, but what do you really do?” Keyes explains the mindset of these discouragers: They’re usually jealous that you’re following your dreams. “I’ll show you,” is perhaps the best response to them.

Keyes is no dummy. He knows the odds are against you if you try to get a book published. What he does, and does brilliantly, is to show you that publishers have been wrong time and time again. Dozens of publishers rejected Grisham and Tom Clancy and most of the writers who are today’s household names. “The truth is,” Keyes says, “that when it comes to predicting which books will succeed in the marketplace, pub[lishing] people are close to clueless.” And Keyes explains why. He describes publishing people as limited in outlook. They mostly live in New York City. They mostly attended the same elite Eastern colleges. They mostly spend time talking to each other, rather than to the general book-buying public.

After reading Keyes’ perspective on publishing people, you’ll never again look upon them as infallible judges of your work. This is decidedly a good thing. Keyes urges you to trust your own valuation of your work above all others’. You need to push on despite the inevitable rejections.

The final part of Keyes’ book tells you 10 ways to keep hope alive, especially if you’re feeling low. One way is to keep in mind all the great writers who have been rejected in the past. Your book’s not selling well? Melville’s Moby Dick was a complete commercial failure. You might join a writers group for the support it provides. Keyes also highly recommends doing something you’re doing right now: reading publications such as The Writer.

Other reasons for hope? Keyes believes the Internet is one, since it gives writers direct access to readers. Also encouraging is the proliferation of small presses and the ease of self-publishing.

Keyes concludes with a helpful alternative to the difficulties of publishing: the joys of writing for its own sake. The immortal Emily Dickinson published a few poems in her lifetime, but then discovered that she was happy not to be published. “Publishing,” Keyes says,     “is only one measure of success. There are many others . . . ” This book, with its compassionate understanding of the writer’s fragile psyche, is sure to lift your spirits when you’re feeling blue.

Chuck Leddy

Chuck Leddy of Quincy, Mass., writes reviews for the Denver Post and other publications and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

October 2003 – Susan K. Perry, Ph.D

More than half of Keyes’ book is devoted to helping writers sustain faith in themselves once they being actively pursuing publication. Keyes makes excellent use of hundreds of anecdotes and quotes from well known writers. For instance, Kipling was told he didn’t know how to use the English language; Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected for being tough to categorize; The Diary of Anne Frank was turned down by one publisher as being lacking in feeling. Keyes offers multiple examples of writers who succeeded against the odds, who kept hope alive, persisted, and prevailed. Informative and highly readable.

Ralph Keyes … has a new guide out this fall. Titled The Writer’s Book of Hope: Getting From Frustration to Publication (Owl Books, $13), it is a nice companion to his 1995 book, The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. Not only does Keyes explore what it means to have hope, he also takes the writer through the fears and the terrible process of rejection. His lucid writing will comfort and inspire any writer – aspiring or established.

Ralph Keyes says in his book The Courage to Write to use the fear.  That’s what they taught me in boot camp too.  So don’t exorcise the fear, exercise it!

The next day was more normal … started with a little tennis, a little lunch, a trip to Davis-Kidd (my absolute favorite bookstore, at least east of the Rocky Mountains J.  Found a great book called The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes (Henry Holt publisher).

If you liked Bird by Bird, I might also suggest The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.  It’s not as funny, but hits the issues on target.

Read the book The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes … He tackles the issue [of offending those you write about] head-on by explaining that this is just one of the perils of writing.  He suggests flattering your family, friends or other “fictional” subjects, by telling them you would like to write about them.  Typically people don’t object, he believes.

I’m not one to read books about writing, but I’ve made some exceptions lately to help with my career reversal.  I read an interesting one recently titled The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.  Some of the thoughts in this book on how writers confront and deal with fear actually helped me swallow and savor the lump in my throat when I gave my “I’m outa here” speech to the editors of the magazine that has employed me for seven years and more.

The book is rich both in thoughtful insights on the nature of the fears professional writers face each morning and in anecdotes about how successful writers have dealt with those fears.

You might want to check out a wonderful book called The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.  It’s about how one’s own fears affect writing and how we as writers can make use of those fears.  I found it very helpful.

Regardless of whether you are interested in writing, this is an excellent book.

This book is my constant companion. It sits on my nightstand waiting for the nights that I wake up in a cold sweat worrying about looming deadlines, envisioning uncorrected errors in my first book, or in a panic that I will not be able to finish the book I’m working on now. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that I would not be a writer today if I had not discovered this book.

If you are a writer or an aspiring writer and you are thinking about buying this book, stop thinking and buy it now! You won’t regret it.

Longmont, CO

A previous reviewer mentioned an important point, which I feel needs to be re-iterated, and that is, Keyes presents so many different takes on how various writers overcame their fears, the reader is left with a confusing array of options, none of which are presented in a concise or manageable format. Simply put, the book does not congeal any techniques into a workable plan. As a writer, I have read quite a few books on this subject and eat technique and craft ideas like candy. This book did not satisfy my appetite for clear-cut techniques. That said, the book succeeds in illustrating how we (writers) must all travel a private path towards his or her writing goals.

This is a short and highly readable book, which I would recommend for all writers; however, while reading the book I remember feeling a bit depressed about the writing process. After reading this book, I pulled out the first draft of my second novel and began to rework it. We’ll see where it goes.

Ron Atkins

Jenny Crusie

Ellen Bales

Charles O’Leary

Linda Moran

That’s why I bought the book The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes. The purpose of the book is to encourage writers to reach out past their fears. However, the first half of the book describes the fears of other, already famous writers. Although these are stories of success meant to encourage its not really that helpful. I came looking for ways to help myself. That’s when I read far enough to get to the second half of the book. Its here the real advice and suggestions start.

One of my favourites is writing before you’re ready. Just start, don’t wait for everything to fall into place surprise yourself into writing. This is something that does work for me. How about using your fear. All that energy generated by your fear of failure, fear of being exposed as a fraud, etc., take it and use it as energy for writing. Get yourself charged up and then pick up a pen, turn on the computer and pour it all out into words. This is something that would take a little mental work but it could work. Could you write in your car, while waiting for your kids at the dentist, in the middle of a packed shopping mall or while sipping a coffee after dinner at your kitchen table. A change of place could bring you a change of pace if you’re feeling trapped by your surroundings, your mood or your fears.

Many other suggestions come up in the book. Each writer needs to read it to find what works for them and which appeals to them personally. There is a lot here for writers of all genres, personalities and skill levels. Here and there are writing tips, for the actual writing. I found this a good experience but I never really found what I was looking for on a personal level. I think my answers might be in a different book, one that covers self-esteem a little deeper. But its a good start at figuring myself out as a writer and it did make me feel inspired to write, create and most of all get my stuff published.

Speaking of obesity, as I just told Meloncutter, I heard a radio report saying the obesity of Americans is, well, growing. We’re getting phatter, or at least fatter. And something like 7 of the 8 top-fat states be in the South. Jump on dat, folks. (You could look it up, as Casey Stengel sorta said according to Ralph Keyes’s The Quote Verifier book.)

http://www.wjst.de/blog/2007/06/10/too-much-checking-on-the-facts-has-ruined-many-a-good-news-story/

SCIENCE SURF

But let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil

Too much checking on the facts has ruined many a good news story

So far, I naively quoted others – “only to better express myself” (Michele de Montaigne). This will, however, change after having read now “The Quote Verifier – who said what, where and when” by Ralph Keyes. He nicely explains in the foreword

The misattribution process is not random. Patterns can be discerned. If a comment is saintly, it must have been made by Gandhi (or Mother Teresa). If it’s about honesty, Lincoln most likely said it (or Washington), about fame, Andy Warhol (or Daniel Boorstin), about courage, John Kennedy (or Ernest Hemingway). Quotations about winning had to have been made by Vince Lombardi (or Leo Durocher), malaprops by Yogi Berra (or Samuel Goldwyn). If witty, a quip must have been made Twain’s concoction, or Wilde’s, or Shaw’s, or Dorothy Parker’s.

I would really like to recommend this book for reading. I am only hesitating as I learned that “A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives”. Yea, yea.

MISQUOTED?

Leo Durocher is widely known for the quote, “Nice guys finish last.” But the Brooklyn Dodgers didn’t exactly say it, according to Ralph Keyes, who examined the origins of 450 famous quotes in his new book “The Quote Verifier.”

In going through microfilm of the July, 1946 copies of New York’s Journal-American Keyes found that he league-leading Dodgers were about to play the seventh-place New York Giants, and a radio reporter asked Durocher why he couldn’t be nicer, the manager waved at the Giants’ dugout and said, “The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.”

The next day, Frank Graham of the Journal-American wrote a column titled “Leo Doesn’t Like Nice Guys.” A reprint of the column in Baseball Digest said nice guys were in “last place,” instead of “seventh place.” Durocher’s words were subsequently compressed into the very quotable “Nice Guys Finish Last.”

“Verdict: Credit the concept to Durocher, its pithy version to the press,” writes Keyes,

Here’s one more – In 1920, when “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was being tried for his role in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, a sportswriter quoted a little boy as asking Jackson outside the courthouse, “It ain’t so, Joe, is it?” That quote was polished to “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

But other sportswriters present at the scene did not include any variation of the quote. And it’s not the type of quote most reporters would gloss over. Jackson, himself, always denied it happened, later calling it “the biggest joke of all.”

“Verdict: Joe said ‘it ain’t so’ was never said, and he probably was right,” Keyes writes.

Ozzie Guillen is hoping to hire Keyes to determine what he means as soon as he says it.

Geoff Stern

The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When by Ralph Keyes is a piece of impressive scholarship — and great fun — attempting to verify various famous quotations. Great fun.

It ain’t not over ’til it ain’t not over.

Of course, you’re familiar with the more quotable “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” typically attributed to Yogi Berra. Only Yogi didn’t say it. Not exactly.

That’s what I’ve just learned from Ralph Keyes’s delicious book The Quote Verifier (St. Martin’s Griffin; $15.95). Also available at amazon.com.

It’s a gem of a book — for an aphorist, a laughorist, or anybody who loves words, quips, and getting the facts right.

Keyes takes hundreds of well-known quotes and painstakingly demonstrates each quote’s origin (insofar as it can be determined) and its evolution.

You’ll be surprised. And delighted.

This book is terrific entertainment (though I confess it can make the reader an insufferable snob if he or she cannot help correcting common assumptions about famous quotes, but I suppose that’s between me and my therapist, or at least my Supervising Laughorist).

But it’s great stuff.

If you want to learn more about The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When or its author, check out:

http://www.ralphkeyes.com/

Since you’ve asked, Marie Antoinette did not originate the phrase “Let them eat cake.” And Leo Durocher, who managed my beloved Giants during their great 1951 miracle against the dreaded Dodgers (who unfortunately won today), did not quite say “Nice guys finish last.”

“You could look it up.”

Oh, that’s another quote Mr. Keyes deconstructs.

The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When by Ralph Keyes. As a certified quote addict this is a “must read.” Keyes tracks down falsely attributed quotes and tells the stories behind them.

Julie D.

Word Daze: The Word Lover’s Almanc

Ralph Keyes in the book The Quote Verifier traces the history of hundreds of quotes and misquotes, including several famous quotations attributed correctly or incorrectly to Benjamin Franklin. See if you can identify which of the quotes below originated with Franklin:

1. For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

2. Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

3. Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.

4. Whose house is of glass, must not throw stones at another.

5. Fish and guests in three days are stale.

6. Things as certain as death and taxes. . . . (3).

Quote of the Day: The immortal axiom-builder, who used to sit up nights reducing the rankest old threadbare platitudes to crisp and snappy maxims that had a nice, varnished, original look . . . –Mark Twain about Benjamin Franklin

Answers: None of the quotes originated with Franklin. Instead, as Twain explains above, he adapted them all from other writers, making them often more clear and concise.

1. George Herbert

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson

3. George Herbert

4. George Herbert

5. Plautus

6. Daniel Defoe

August 24: Weather Words Day

Today is the anniversary of an editorial by Charles Dudley Warner published in the Hartford Courant in 1897. The subject of the editorial is long forgotten, but one quote from the article lives on as a famous quote: Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Although many credit Warner with the funny line, some argue that it really should be credited to Mark Twain, who was a friend and collaborator with Charles Dudley Warner. Ralph Keyes, the author of The Quote Verifier, comes down on Twain’s side, saying that the wording of the editorial reveals that Warner got the quote from Twain: “A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it”

rich

‘Cause I know how much you guys enjoy your quotations. Pick up a copy of The Quote Verifier, by Ralph Keyes. 

I just got wind of this through Kilpatrick’s column, and apparently Yogi Berra didn’t say a lot of things he’s supposed to have said, and Edmund Burke apparently didn’t tell us “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Don’t Get Caught Misquoting…

…as there’s an author ready to pounce. Ralph Keyes’new book, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When, excerpted here in today’s Washington Post, looks at famous speakers and how they mangled quotes in speeches, sometimes to good effect. John F. Kennedy is the subject of the Post excerpt, and Keyes says that, in addition to being well-spoken, “Kennedy was also… a misquoter of eloquence, who showed how creative and unreliable memory can be when using comments others have uttered.” Check out the misquotes — including many that improved upon the original — and read the book to reconsider the sources you are using in speeches and conversation. We like an authoritative source, Bartleby, where you can search several collections of quotations and their correct citations. Then add Keyes’ book to your reference shelf; it’s out this month from St. Martin’s Press.

posted by dgr

Better Check Those Quotes

As commencement speeches are heard across the land, speakers are reaching for their inner Bartlett’s. Unfortunately, some of these speakers need to do a little more fact checking before they insert quotes into their speeches.

At Boston University last Sunday, for instance, Les Moonves, the president of CBS, quoted John Lennon to the assembled throng: ”Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans.”

Senator Bill Frist, encouraging graduates-to-be at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, quoted Margaret Mead: ”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.”

And Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, promised the audience at Wake Forest University that he would follow ”Winston Churchill’s sage advice” on public speaking: ”Be clear. Be concise. Be seated.”

You could look it up (as James Thurber, and then Casey Stengel, said), but could you trust the source? As Ralph Keyes explains in his new book, ”The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When” (St. Martin’s Griffin), even the most respectable sources can get attributions wrong, and the less respectable don’t even try to get them right.

That line Moonves quoted does appear in a Lennon song, for instance-but it doesn’t originate there. Keyes found it attributed to Allen Saunders (creator of the comic strip ”Mary Worth”) in a 1957 Reader’s Digest-though you wouldn’t want to take that as the last word on the subject.

Frist had the right wording for Margaret Mead’s most famous ”quotation,” but, says Keyes, nobody has ever been able to show, ”despite copious research,” that she ever said or wrote it. As for Churchill, he-like Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln-is what Keyes calls a ”flypaper figure,” a personage so famously quotable that lesser wags’ witticisms and anonymous maxims, like the one Warner used, get stuck to him.

Why is it so easy to go wrong? ”Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them,” writes Keyes. A good line-like ”any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and anyone who is still a socialist at 40 has no head”-deserves a Churchill (or a Disraeli or a Bismarck). Unfortunately, the sentiment originated with a French statesman named Francois Guizot. Who wants to quote Francois Guizot?

My praise of The Quote Verifier [yesterday] was too restrained … Really an outstanding book.

Fred Shapiro, Editor, Yale Book of Quotations

There is a new and wonderful book for writers written by a good friend who is NOT an RPCV (even though my wife is convinced I don’t know anyone who wasn’t in the Peace Corps). His name is Ralph Keyes. The book is entitled, The Quote Verifier and it explores several hundred quotations that are often cited but seldom confirmed. To determine the roots of 460 such sayings, Keyes scoured old publications, accessed huge databases, watched vintage movies, consulted myriad scholars, and contacted those actually involved in coining popular quotations. His results routinely confound widespread assumptions about who said what, where, and when.

For example, “Murder your darlings.” This common admonition to writers (suggesting that they excise the parts of their work that most delight them) is widely misattributed to the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner. Its actual author was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who wrote in The Art of Writing (1916), “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When by Ralph Keyes is out this month from St. Martin’s Griffin.

WHO SAID THAT ABOUT GOD?

All of us can toss around quotes about religion — and sometimes we’re even sure of the original source.

A year or two ago, for instance, I wrote a column mentioning the results of a national survey that showed the most well-known and commonly used quote from the Bible is this: “God helps those who help themselves.” Well, as I pointed out in the column, not only is that not found in the Bible, but the theology behind it is essentially unbiblical.

Where can we go to verify such quotes?

You’ve come to the right place today for an answer. You can go to the work of a guy I met in 1992 in Columbus, Ohio, where he was one of the speakers at the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. His name is Ralph Keyes, and his new book is called The Quote Verifier.

Among other things, Keyes (whose last name, by the way, is pronounced Kize, not Keez) teaches writing to ministers, mostly Baptist, in a doctoral program. So when he decided to put together this book checking on the true sources of various quotes, he included some faith-based quotes.

For instance, here’s his entry on “God helps those who help themselves”: “Despite a widespread misconception that these words come straight from the Bible, Aesop wrote, five centuries before the birth of Christ, ‘The gods help them that help themselves.’ Two millennia later, James Howell included in a 1659 collection of proverbs, ‘God helps him, who helps himself.’ In 1698 this became ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ from the pen of British politician Algernon Sidney. Thirty-five years after that, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard observed, ‘God helps them that help themselves.’ Verdict: Credit Aesop for recording an early version of this thought, which was probably commonplace even in his time.”

You’ll also find interesting entries on such phrases as “Religion is the opium of the people” and “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

The Peace Corps Writer

Murder your darlings

There is a new and wonderful book for writers written by a good friend who is NOT an RPCV (even though my wife is convinced I don’t know anyone who wasn’t in the Peace Corps). His name is Ralph Keyes. The book is entitled, The Quote Verifier and it explores several hundred quotations that are often cited but seldom confirmed. To determine the roots of 460 such sayings, Keyes scoured old publications, accessed huge databases, watched vintage movies, consulted myriad scholars, and contacted those actually involved in coining popular quotations. His results routinely confound widespread assumptions about who said what, where, and when.

For example, “Murder your darlings.” This common admonition to writers (suggesting that they excise the parts of their work that most delight them) is widely misattributed to the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner. Its actual author was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who wrote in The Art of Writing (1916), “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When by Ralph Keyes is out this month from St. Martin’s Griffin.

American Dialect Society

My praise of The Quote Verifier [yesterday] was too restrained … Really an outstanding book.

Fred Shapiro, Editor, Yale Book of Quotations

Betsy’s Page

Better Check Those Quotes

As commencement speeches are heard across the land, speakers are reaching for their inner Bartlett’s. Unfortunately, some of these speakers need to do a little more fact checking before they insert quotes into their speeches.

At Boston University last Sunday, for instance, Les Moonves, the president of CBS, quoted John Lennon to the assembled throng: ”Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans.”

Senator Bill Frist, encouraging graduates-to-be at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, quoted Margaret Mead: ”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.”

And Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, promised the audience at Wake Forest University that he would follow ”Winston Churchill’s sage advice” on public speaking: ”Be clear. Be concise. Be seated.”

You could look it up (as James Thurber, and then Casey Stengel, said), but could you trust the source? As Ralph Keyes explains in his new book, ”The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When” (St. Martin’s Griffin), even the most respectable sources can get attributions wrong, and the less respectable don’t even try to get them right.

That line Moonves quoted does appear in a Lennon song, for instance-but it doesn’t originate there. Keyes found it attributed to Allen Saunders (creator of the comic strip ”Mary Worth”) in a 1957 Reader’s Digest-though you wouldn’t want to take that as the last word on the subject.

Frist had the right wording for Margaret Mead’s most famous ”quotation,” but, says Keyes, nobody has ever been able to show, ”despite copious research,” that she ever said or wrote it. As for Churchill, he-like Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln-is what Keyes calls a ”flypaper figure,” a personage so famously quotable that lesser wags’ witticisms and anonymous maxims, like the one Warner used, get stuck to him.

Why is it so easy to go wrong? ”Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them,” writes Keyes. A good line-like ”any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and anyone who is still a socialist at 40 has no head”-deserves a Churchill (or a Disraeli or a Bismarck). Unfortunately, the sentiment originated with a French statesman named Francois Guizot. Who wants to quote Francois Guizot?

Don’t Get Caught

Don’t Get Caught Misquoting…

…as there’s an author ready to pounce. Ralph Keyes’new book, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When, excerpted here in today’s Washington Post, looks at famous speakers and how they mangled quotes in speeches, sometimes to good effect. John F. Kennedy is the subject of the Post excerpt, and Keyes says that, in addition to being well-spoken, “Kennedy was also… a misquoter of eloquence, who showed how creative and unreliable memory can be when using comments others have uttered.” Check out the misquotes — including many that improved upon the original — and read the book to reconsider the sources you are using in speeches and conversation. We like an authoritative source, Bartleby, where you can search several collections of quotations and their correct citations. Then add Keyes’ book to your reference shelf; it’s out this month from St. Martin’s Press.

posted by dgr

Unca Harlan’s Art Deco Dining Pavilion

rich

‘Cause I know how much you guys enjoy your quotations. Pick up a copy of The Quote Verifier, by Ralph Keyes. 

I just got wind of this through Kilpatrick’s column, and apparently Yogi Berra didn’t say a lot of things he’s supposed to have said, and Edmund Burke apparently didn’t tell us “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Summer Reading

The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When by Ralph Keyes. As a certified quote addict this is a “must read.” Keyes tracks down falsely attributed quotes and tells the stories behind them.

Julie D.

Word Daze: The Word Lover’s Almanc

Ralph Keyes in the book The Quote Verifier traces the history of hundreds of quotes and misquotes, including several famous quotations attributed correctly or incorrectly to Benjamin Franklin. See if you can identify which of the quotes below originated with Franklin:

1. For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

2. Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

3. Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.

4. Whose house is of glass, must not throw stones at another.

5. Fish and guests in three days are stale.

6. Things as certain as death and taxes. . . . (3).

Quote of the Day: The immortal axiom-builder, who used to sit up nights reducing the rankest old threadbare platitudes to crisp and snappy maxims that had a nice, varnished, original look . . . –Mark Twain about Benjamin Franklin

Answers: None of the quotes originated with Franklin. Instead, as Twain explains above, he adapted them all from other writers, making them often more clear and concise.

1. George Herbert

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson

3. George Herbert

4. George Herbert

5. Plautus

6. Daniel Defoe

August 24: Weather Words Day

Today is the anniversary of an editorial by Charles Dudley Warner published in the Hartford Courant in 1897. The subject of the editorial is long forgotten, but one quote from the article lives on as a famous quote: Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Although many credit Warner with the funny line, some argue that it really should be credited to Mark Twain, who was a friend and collaborator with Charles Dudley Warner. Ralph Keyes, the author of The Quote Verifier, comes down on Twain’s side, saying that the wording of the editorial reveals that Warner got the quote from Twain: “A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it”

The Laughorist

A venue for solipsistic eavesdroppers, verbal voyeurs, and hoarse whisperers amid the endless din.

It ain’t not over ’til it ain’t not over.

Of course, you’re familiar with the more quotable “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” typically attributed to Yogi Berra. Only Yogi didn’t say it. Not exactly.

That’s what I’ve just learned from Ralph Keyes’s delicious book The Quote Verifier (St. Martin’s Griffin; $15.95). Also available at amazon.com.

It’s a gem of a book — for an aphorist, a laughorist, or anybody who loves words, quips, and getting the facts right.

Keyes takes hundreds of well-known quotes and painstakingly demonstrates each quote’s origin (insofar as it can be determined) and its evolution.

You’ll be surprised. And delighted.

This book is terrific entertainment (though I confess it can make the reader an insufferable snob if he or she cannot help correcting common assumptions about famous quotes, but I suppose that’s between me and my therapist, or at least my Supervising Laughorist).

But it’s great stuff.

If you want to learn more about The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When or its author, check out:

http://www.ralphkeyes.com/

Since you’ve asked, Marie Antoinette did not originate the phrase “Let them eat cake.” And Leo Durocher, who managed my beloved Giants during their great 1951 miracle against the dreaded Dodgers (who unfortunately won today), did not quite say “Nice guys finish last.”

“You could look it up.”

Oh, that’s another quote Mr. Keyes deconstructs.

Leading You Into New Zealand’s Dog Web

Non-Doggy Reading

Geoff Stern

The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When by Ralph Keyes is a piece of impressive scholarship — and great fun — attempting to verify various famous quotations. Great fun.

BILLY BALL

Billy-Ball Daily / Bill Chuck (Billy-Ball his own self)

MISQUOTED?

Leo Durocher is widely known for the quote, “Nice guys finish last.” But the Brooklyn Dodgers didn’t exactly say it, according to Ralph Keyes, who examined the origins of 450 famous quotes in his new book “The Quote Verifier.”

In going through microfilm of the July, 1946 copies of New York’s Journal-American Keyes found that he league-leading Dodgers were about to play the seventh-place New York Giants, and a radio reporter asked Durocher why he couldn’t be nicer, the manager waved at the Giants’ dugout and said, “The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.”

The next day, Frank Graham of the Journal-American wrote a column titled “Leo Doesn’t Like Nice Guys.” A reprint of the column in Baseball Digest said nice guys were in “last place,” instead of “seventh place.” Durocher’s words were subsequently compressed into the very quotable “Nice Guys Finish Last.”

“Verdict: Credit the concept to Durocher, its pithy version to the press,” writes Keyes,

Here’s one more – In 1920, when “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was being tried for his role in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, a sportswriter quoted a little boy as asking Jackson outside the courthouse, “It ain’t so, Joe, is it?” That quote was polished to “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

But other sportswriters present at the scene did not include any variation of the quote. And it’s not the type of quote most reporters would gloss over. Jackson, himself, always denied it happened, later calling it “the biggest joke of all.”

“Verdict: Joe said ‘it ain’t so’ was never said, and he probably was right,” Keyes writes.

Ozzie Guillen is hoping to hire Keyes to determine what he means as soon as he says it.

Quotations on Education

I refer you to a new book out in paperback: The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes; you’ll be surprised how many quotations are misattributed. It’s very entertaining.

The Wonderful World of Nothing Worhwhile

the laughorist said…

Speaking of obesity, as I just told Meloncutter, I heard a radio report saying the obesity of Americans is, well, growing. We’re getting phatter, or at least fatter. And something like 7 of the 8 top-fat states be in the South. Jump on dat, folks. (You could look it up, as Casey Stengel sorta said according to Ralph Keyes’s The Quote Verifier book.)

http://www.wjst.de/blog/2007/06/10/too-much-checking-on-the-facts-has-ruined-many-a-good-news-story/

SCIENCE SURF

But let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil

Too much checking on the facts has ruined many a good news story

So far, I naively quoted others – “only to better express myself” (Michele de Montaigne). This will, however, change after having read now “The Quote Verifier – who said what, where and when” by Ralph Keyes. He nicely explains in the foreword

The misattribution process is not random. Patterns can be discerned. If a comment is saintly, it must have been made by Gandhi (or Mother Teresa). If it’s about honesty, Lincoln most likely said it (or Washington), about fame, Andy Warhol (or Daniel Boorstin), about courage, John Kennedy (or Ernest Hemingway). Quotations about winning had to have been made by Vince Lombardi (or Leo Durocher), malaprops by Yogi Berra (or Samuel Goldwyn). If witty, a quip must have been made Twain’s concoction, or Wilde’s, or Shaw’s, or Dorothy Parker’s.

I would really like to recommend this book for reading. I am only hesitating as I learned that “A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives”. Yea, yea.

Karl Shmavonian

The editor of Forbes’s venerable quotes page reflects on the hazards of his profession.

“Misquotation is the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.” –Hesketh Pearson.

Those words are soothing balm for the not-so-learned editor of the Forbes Thoughts on the Business of Life page, for there’s always a lingering fear as the page goes to press that an item was either mangled or misattributed. This editor, who has shepherded that page for the last decade, also takes solace in the fact that far greater men than he have butchered citations, in the process making them their own mutant creations (sometimes even improving on the original).

As Ralph Keyes points out, in his superb book The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When, (St. Martin’s Press, 2006): “Misquotation is an occupational hazard of quotation. The more we quote, the more likely we are to misquote.” Keyes’ book is devoted to adjudicating whether some of Western civilization’s most famous sayings are correctly attributed. He devotes a whole section to pointing out John F. Kennedy’s numerous misattributions, the most famous being “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” which JFK attributed to Edmund Burke. It turns out that Burke likely never said or wrote that, and nobody is certain who did.

So, anyone compiling quotations is diving into a historical stream of earnest malfeasance; as long as that person uses good sources (several of which are listed at the end of this article), sound judgment (trusting the gut) and due diligence, his mistakes will be few and far between. Let’s face it, we’ll never know the provenance of many words of wisdom. How many Yogi Berra-isms were actually uttered by that great athlete and sage? (I can’t resist quoting one of my colleagues who once went to the Yogi Berra museum and discovered that he was there early. Shrugging, he said, “Well, it ain’t open till it’s open.”)

One other hazard of putting together the Thoughts page: boring our readers with overused utterances. The best way to avoid this is to steer clear of the titans (Wilde, Shaw, Thoreau, Emerson, Bierce, the usual suspects). They all had great things to say, but you’ve probably heard them all.

The goal at the Forbes Thoughts on the Business of Life page is to never use a quote twice (unless it’s just so good that the editor can’t resist). Using quotes from contemporaries is a great way to keep the page fresh, but it takes discipline (if the editor heard a great nugget while sipping martinis at a cocktail party, he’s likely to forget it the next morning). One clever way a former editor of the Thoughts page assured that aphorisms were of the moment was to quote himself, sneaking his pearls in under the nom de plume of John P. Grier (a Thoroughbred racehorse from long ago).

Robert Benchley once said, “The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.” A corollary worth remembering is that the surest way for an editor to make a monkey of himself is to misquote somebody.

By Cathy Gillentine

I got a new book at the Boston convention that I am just now getting around to looking at. It was worth the wait.

It’s called, “The Quote Verifier,” by Ralph Keyes, and it helps straighten out a lot of quotes we always are hearing, letting us know what’s really right, what’s only close to right and what’s completely wrong.

You may not care. But those of us who write stuff sometimes need to find out if what we are saying is really so.

One whole section is from the movies, so most of us are fairly familiar.

I remember “What a dump,” because Elizabeth Taylor says it in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and we all know she is quoting Bette Davis. But what movie? It was “Beyond the Forest,” in 1949. But it really began in 1945 in “Fallen Angel.” I didn’t know that.

Remember “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”? Strother Martin says it to Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke.” Only in the movie, Martin does not say the “a.” Instead, he just pauses.

Then there is, “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” In the book, author Mario Puzo has Don Vito Corleone saying, “I’m a businessman. I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Puzo then co-wrote the screenplay of “The Godfather” with director Francis Ford Coppola.

Going back much further in time, we remember a quote attributed to James Cagney, one of the classic gangsters. Impersonators “doing” him always say, “You dirty rat.” Cagney insisted he never said that. What he did say in “Blond Crazy,” in 1931, was “That dirty double-crossin’ rat.”

In his autobiography, according to Keyes, Cagney also relates he did not ever say, “All right you guys,” which he insisted sounded more like the Bowery Boys.

Equally false, said Charles Boyer, was his line “Come with me to the Kasbah.”

Some of you young whippersnappers don’t know what I am talking about, and equally so when I quote you, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Johnny Weismuller swears he never said that.

But you probably have all heard the most famous exit line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” said by Rhett Butler at the end of “Gone With the Wind.” In the book, Rhett doesn’t say the “frankly,” which was probably added by screenwriter Sydney Howard.

Those of you who have lived only in this generation of filth won’t believe it, but it is true the censors tried to have the line changed to remove the “damn.”

We’ve all heard “don’t sweat the small stuff.” And the following “It’s all small stuff.” Ann Landers quoted it, but didn’t claim it. So, earlier, did Erma Bombeck. After lots of checking, our author found the source in a 1983 Time article dealing with stress, written by cardiologist Robert S. Eliot, who gets original credit.

Remember the reign of Ronald Reagan being called “the Teflon presidency?’’

The story goes that Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., was preparing eggs for her family’s breakfast in a nonstick frying pan and thinking, as she often did, about Ronald Reagan. “What was it that kept this bumbler from ever being penalized for his mistakes?” she thought. She looked at the pan. Reagan was just like Teflon. Nothing stuck to him.

She said much the same thing that same day on the floor of the House.

Nothing else stuck to Reagan. That one did.

By Lonnie Brown

The Coffee Guzzlers Club members had kindly asked our waitress for refills. “Show me the money,” she mumbled on her way by.

Nevermore, the club’s pet raven and mascot, provided some insight into the remark.

Quoth the Raven: “Cuba Gooding Jr. made the line famous in the 1996 Jerry Maguire movie. But actually, it has been around for a long time — for more than 100 years.”

As it turns out, the raven has been reading a new book by Ralph Keyes, “The Quote Verifier — Who Said What, Where and When” (St. Martin’s Griffin; $15.95).

In an interview last month with National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation,” Keyes said even the 17th edition of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” book attributes the quote to screenwriter Cameron Crowe.

That’s probably because Crowe told ABC’s Chris Wallace in an interview: “You’re looking at the man who invented the phrase ‘show me the money.’ I deserve all the credit for it.”

Not exactly, said Keyes. “There are a lot of databases now where you can enter key words and they’ll take you back to early newspapers and early magazines. I did that and I found ‘show me the money’ was early boxer parlance.”

Specifically, Jim Jefferies was asked in 1901 if he would fight Gus Ruhlin for the heavyweight championship. Said Jefferies: “Why, certainly, but I don’t propose to fight him for 50 cents. They must show me the money.”

Keyes said five years later, Battling Nelson, a lightweight champ, told a reporter he would “fight anybody if you show me the money.” In 1907, heavyweight Tommy Burns was asked about fighting Jack Johnson. “Show me the money!” said Burns. “Show me the money and I’ll fight if it’s enough.”

Keyes said his research often found good-sounding quotes that couldn’t immediately be assigned to a speaker would drift about as “orphan quotes.” Finally, they were given a personality.

If I said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” you might remember that the quote has been associated with the late Green Bay Packers’ coach Vince Lombardi.

“It must have been Vince Lombardi,” said Keyes. “Everybody’s heard of him. It was actually Red Sanders, a coach in the early ’50s at UCLA who originated that one. But who’s heard of Red Sanders?”

Keyes found that many of Sanders’ colleagues from the 1930s recall him using the phrase when he was was coaching highschool football in Georgia. In 1950, Sanders, then at UCLA, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times: “Speaking about football victories, Sanders told his group, ‘Men, I’ll be honest. Winning isn’t everything. [Long pause.] It’s the only thing! [Laughter].’ ”

P.T. Barnum is often cited as saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Keyes’ book notes that Barry Popik, called “the restless genius of American etymology” by The Wall Street Journal, found three 1883 newspaper articles referring to “There’s a sucker born every minute” as a saying popular among New York City gamblers.

Keyes said that one person did actually say a quote oft attributed to him — but he said the nowfamous quote in the course of denying quotes that had been attributed to him.

“I really didn’t say everything I said,” said former New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra.

Lonnie Brown, The Ledger’s associate editor, is interlocutor of the Coffee Guzzlers Club. The club motto this week is: “I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” (Keyes said Robert McCloskey, a State Department spokesman during the Vietnam War, actually made this statement to reporters.)

By Ralph Keyes
Originally appearing in Issue #37, Jul/Aug 2006

We are no less likely to be vague about the origins of quotations about dogs than we are to be vague about the origins of quotations in general. Who said “Love me, love my dog”? Or that a man biting a dog is news? Was it Harry Truman who thought your only friend in Washington was a dog? Did Charles de Gaulle say that the better he knew men, the more he liked dogs? These were some of the questions that confronted me when I set out to explore the roots of familiar quotations. The answers were not always what I expected.

Love me, love my dog.
This has been identified as an old proverb, possibly Italian, or Spanish or French or English, or all of them. It is commonly thought to come from an 1150 sermon by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who referred to the saying as a proverb. (The dog breed was named after an earlier St. Bernard.) Sir Joshua Reynolds later painted a picture inspired by this saying, and P. G. Wodehouse wrote a story using it as his title.

Verdict: Proverbial wisdom publicized by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

When a dog bites a man, that isn’t news. When a man bites a dog, that’s news.
By legend, this was the response of New York Sun city editor John Bogart (1845–1921) to a cub reporter who, in the early 1880s, asked him to define “news.” The author of a 1918 history of the Sun credited Bogart with this comment. It was recalled when he died in 1921. The observation has also been attributed to Sun editor Charles A. Dana; to its first managing editor, Amos Cummings; and to early-20th-century British press baron Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth). Whoever first defined news as “man-bites-dog” may have got that notion from Oliver Goldsmith’s An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog. In this 1766 poem, a kindly man in Islington is bitten by a dog whom he’d befriended. To the consternation of all, “The man recovered of the bite,/The dog it was that died.” This popular bit of doggerel was adapted in many forms, including one in which a man actually bit a dog. Lexicographer Eric Partridge believed that this might have inspired the classic definition of news.

Verdict: Someone at the New York Sun apparently said this in the late 19th century, John Bogart being the leading suspect, perhaps inspired by an Oliver Goldsmith poem.

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Truman Library archivists question the common attribution of this quip to the 33rd US president. They point out that Truman spent much of his young manhood on a farm, where dogs were helpers more than pets. Harry and his wife, Bess, had no particular fondness for dogs, and gave away the two that were given to them while they lived in the White House. So why is “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” so routinely attributed to Harry Truman? Because the script of Samuel Gallu’s 1975 play, Give ’em Hell, Harry, had Truman saying, “You want a friend in life, get a dog!” This script was subsequently published in book form. A few years later, New York Times correspondent Maureen Dowd attributed the remark to Truman (with “Washington” taking the place of “life”), as did President Bill Clinton. Clinton’s predecessor, George H. W. Bush, more accurately credited the quip to “some cynic.”

Verdict: An old saw put in Harry Truman’s mouth.

The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.
This observation is generally credited to Charles de Gaulle, apparently on the basis of a 1967 attribution in a Time magazine article about a collection of the French president’s remarks. In centuries past, many other French natives have been credited with the same basic thought. They include the inimitable letter-writer Madame de Sévigne (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigne, 1626–1696), the revolutionary writer Madame Roland (Marie-Jeanne Philipon, 1754–1793), author-politician Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), author Alphonse Toussenel (1803–1885) and author Louise de la Ramée (1839–1908).

Verdict: Charles de Gaulle was the most recent spokesperson for a long-standing Gallic take on humanity.

By Sam Venable

I’ve been planning this for weeks, ever since I happened upon a copy of “The Quote Verifier” by Ralph Keyes in the reference department of Lawson McGhee Library.

(Well, no; that’s not wholly accurate. I didn’t “happen upon” Keyes’ book. I went to the reference department with the express purpose of looking it up, after having read a delightful review. If you’re going to split historical hairs, it’s important to do so in complete candor.)

We’ll start with what Keyes calls “America’s bedrock parable of honesty.” That would, of course, be George Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie.”

Except good ol’ George never uttered it, certainly not in the context of a downed cherry tree.

Keyes says the quote, preached by parents to their wayward offspring for multiple generations, was the contrivance of biographer Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825).

Not only was Weems’ book “more fiction than fact,” Keyes says Weems’ claim of being the “rector of Mount Vernon parish” also was bunkum: “There was no such church.”

In much the same fashion, “honest” Abe Lincoln wasn’t quite so trustworthy when it came to lifting a nifty quote here or there.

According to Keyes:

” ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ drew on similar expressions by Daniel Webster and Theodore Parker, among others.

” ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all’ – John Quincy Adams said essentially the same thing decades before Lincoln did.”

In addition, Keyes lists a string of famous quotes that, though popularly attributed to Lincoln, likely were put into his mouth by others. To wit:

” ‘If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.’ This is what we’d like Lincoln to have said about slavery, but there is no reliable evidence that he did.

” ‘Tell me what brand of whiskey Grant drinks. I’ll send a barrel to my other generals.’ No one who has taken a serious look at this amusing remark thinks it originated with Lincoln, or that he said it at all.”

Modern presidents aren’t spared, either.

“John F. Kennedy loved to pepper his speeches and public statements with quotations,” Keyes writes. “This not only perked up his prose but improved his press by giving him an air of erudition …

“(But) even though JFK routinely got his quotations wrong, it took years for us to figure this out. Meanwhile, the young president launched any number of misworded, misattributed or completely mystifying quotations into the public conversation, where they’ve stuck around to this day.”

Most notable is his “ask not” appeal that “echoed similar exhortations by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Warren Harding and the headmaster of Kennedy’s prep school, among others.”

There’s much more fun from presidents recent and distant. Go check the details for yourself.

Keyes’ research proves you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

Which, by the way, Abe didn’t say either.

By Frank Herron

Independence Day brings with it a celebration of this country’s Founding Fathers and other giants of American history.

The reputation of these famous people is often based on the words they said.

But sometimes the famous words were never spoken by the famous mouth.

Enter Ralph Keyes – a self-styled “quotographer.”

His latest book, “The Quote Verifier” (St. Martin’s Griffin, $15.95), serves as a handbook for finding out who really said what – and when they said it.

Within its pages, readers can discover – if they can bear it – that some of the most treasured words need a new home. His book presents a mouthful of examples of quotes that have been incorrectly attributed to famous people.

Keyes calls some of these people “flypaper figures” because words tend to stick to them. Among these are Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and some lesser-known wits, such as Dorothy Parker.

For example, that’s what happened to the phrase, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

Although that statement is widely attributed to Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, Keyes shows that credit should go to football coach Red Sanders, who used the phrase as long ago as the 1930s.

Keyes acknowledges that many people are unwilling to accept the fact that Marie Antoinette didn’t really say, “Let them eat cake” or that baseball coach Leo Durocher didn’t say, “Nice guys finish last.”

Many people react by saying things like, “Leave us with our myths. Leave us with our, legends,” says Keyes, an Ohioan whose last name, he explains, rhymes with “buckeyes.”

That kind of reaction is OK, up to a point, he said. He doesn’t mind that someone in casual conversation says that George Washington said, “I cannot tell a lie”—even if that is, well, a lie.

“That’s like the parking ticket of literary crimes, if that,” he says in a recent phone interview. “I think that’s close to meaningless. Better to keep the conversation going with a misattribution than to stop and look it up in ‘The Quote Verifier.’”

But others need to be more careful, says Keyes, who has learned not to trust his own memory when it comes to quotations.

“If you’re writing a work of scholarship or a book or a serious magazine article, you owe it to the reader not to pass off apocrypha as fact,” says Keyes, who gives a verdict for the source of each of the more than 400 sayings covered in the book.

Included among those quotations are some of the most famous statements of American history.

Here’s a look at some of them, as presented in “The Quote Verifier”:

George Washington: “I cannot tell a lie.”

This hallowed quote supposedly illustrates the from-the-cradle honesty of the first president. It’s the key part of the story from Washington’s youth, as told by biographer Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825). In it, a young, hatchet‑holding George nobly confesses to chopping down a cherry tree. Keyes quotes from the biography: “Looking at his father with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’”

Keyes’ verdict: “More Weems than Washington.”

Relax!

Not everything you’ve heard about famous sayings in American history is wrong. Ralph Keyes writes that Ben Franklin really should be credited with this: “Those who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all of the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Keyes says this statement is traditionally linked to an 1858 speech given by Lincoln in Clinton, Ill. There’s no evidence of the statement in Lincoln’s writings. Nor is it included in any known press account of his speeches Long after the fact, people recalled hearing Lincoln give a speech that dealt with the topic of how people are fooled. This maxim became part of Lincoln lore thanks mostly to a book published in 1904, “Abe Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories.” In it, the author said Lincoln made the remark to a visitor. Keyes says Lincoln scholars give little credence to the Civil War president having made the statement.

Keyes’s verdict: “Author unknown; probably not Lincoln.”

Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Supposedly, Henry made this famous statement at the end of a speech he made at the second Virginia Convention in March 1775. Instead, it is likely from the pen of Henry’s biographer William Wirt, who based his attribution to Henry on the memory of two of Henry’s contemporaries. Wirt apparently put, together the speech that now appears in published collections. The phrase is similar to a passage from “Cato,’” a play Joseph Addison wrote in 1713.

Keyes’s verdict: Credit William Wirt, with an assist from Joseph Addison.

Ben Franklin: “We must all hang together, or most as suredly we shall all hang separately.”

Supposedly, Franklin said this as he signed the Declaration of Independence. But no contemporary accounts mention it. Evidence points, instead, to Richard Penn, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania. A joke book printed in 1839 and a Franklin biography of 1840 put the statement in Franklin’s mouth, and “there it has stayed,” Keyes writes.

Keyes’ s verdict: If it can be attributed to anybody, credit should go to Richard Penn.

Ralph Keyes’s lovely little book “The Quote Verifier” attributes the famous line, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small,” to political scientist Wallace Sayre. Sayre, in turn, may have been inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s observation that the intensity of the academic squabbles he witnessed while president of Princeton University was a function of the “triviality” of the issues being considered

By Mary Ann Gwinn, book editor

Thanks to “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where and When” by Ralph Keyes (St. Martin’s Press, $15.95), I may be as close as I’ll ever get to finding out who first uttered my all-time favorite quote, which is:

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Keyes writes that it’s commonly attributed to Samuel Johnson, the second-most-quoted-Englishman after Shakespeare. But it’s not original: Johnson’s chronicler-biographer, Boswell, wrote it as, “Hell is paved with good intentions.” However, “that thought was hardly original to him (Johnson), nor did he imply that it was,” writes Keyes.

Other more authentic Johnsonisms include:

“No Man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

“I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.”

By Cristina Rouvalis

Say it ain’t so.

A crestfallen boy didn’t tell “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

And Mark Twain likely didn’t coin “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

It wasn’t Vince Lombardi who first proclaimed, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

At least that’s the verdict of Ralph Keyes, a quote sleuth who examined the origins of 450 famous quotes in his new, entertaining book “The Quote Verifier.” Many of the iconic quotes of our time were plucked from obscure people and placed in the mouths of famous people. Other quotes were edited from their original flabby form. And some seem to be journalistic wishful thinking.

People often hate to hear their favorite quotes besmirched or deconstructed into a blander form. That doesn’t make Keyes, an author from Yellow Springs, Ohio, the most popular guy around.

“Writing books about verifying quotes doesn’t get you invited to many parties,” quips Keyes, who will offer his opinion of quotes only when asked.

Quotes often improve with age. “Memory may be a terrible librarian, but it’s a great editor,” to quote Keyes. (Accurately. Honest.)

The Andy Warhol quote, “Everyone has their 15 minutes of fame” was really the less pithy, “In the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Journalists, Keyes writes, often compress meandering quotes into perfect sound bites, and misquotes and misattributed quotes soar through cyberspace.

Leo Durocher is widely known for the quote, “Nice guys finish last.” But did the Brooklyn Dodgers manager really say it?

Well. Sorta.

Keyes combed through microfilm of the July 1946 copies of New York’s Journal-American to find the answer.

The league-leading Dodgers were about to play the seventh-place New York Giants, and Durocher ran down the Giant’s bad record to a group of sports scribes.

When a radio reporter asked Durocher why he couldn’t be nicer, the manager waved at the Giants’ dugout and said, “The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.”

The next day, Frank Graham of the Journal-American wrote a column titled “Leo Doesn’t Like Nice Guys.” A reprint of the column in Baseball Digest said nice guys were in “last place,” instead of “seventh place.” Durocher’s words were subsequently compressed into the very quotable “Nice Guys Finish Last.”

“Verdict: Credit the concept to Durocher, its pithy version to the press,” writes Keyes, who puts a verdict at the end of all the quotes he tracked down.

By Michael Kesterton

Why is it so easy to get quotations wrong? “Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them,” writes Ralph Keyes in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When. A good line — such as “any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and anyone who is still a socialist at 40 has no head” — deserves a Churchill (or a Disraeli or a Bismarck), adds The Boston Globe reviewer. Unfortunately, the sentiment originated with a French statesman named Francois Guizot. Who wants to quote Francois Guizot?

By Ralph Keyes

Political figures routinely get their quotations wrong. No modern politician has stood out quite so much in this regard as John F. Kennedy. JFK loved to pepper his speeches and public statements with quotations. This not only perked up his prose, but improved his press by giving him an air of erudition. Kennedy was also, however, a misquoter of eloquence, who showed how creative and unreliable memory can be when using comments others have uttered.

Kennedy’s main resource for quotations was his own memory and the notebook in which he’d jotted quotations and other material for years — some drawn from books he’d read, but most from his mind. According to his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy “was the chief source of his own best quotations.” As a result, he was an endless source of half-remembered quotations that his aides and Library of Congress staff members scurried to try to confirm.

With such a haphazard approach, JFK was not always as knowledgeable as he tried to sound. Before his wife, Jacqueline, corrected him, Kennedy combined lines by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost to conclude some of his speeches by saying:

I’ll hitch my wagon to a star (Emerson)

But I have promises to keep (Frost)

And miles to go before I sleep (Frost)

Even though JFK routinely garbled his quotations, it took us years to figure this out. Meanwhile, the young president launched any number of misworded, misattributed or completely mystifying quotations into the public conversation that have stuck around to this day.

The most glaring example is “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” which Kennedy attributed to British philosopher Edmund Burke and which recently was judged the most popular quotation of modern times in a poll conducted by editors of “The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.” Even though it is clear by now that Burke is unlikely to have made this observation, no one has ever been able to determine who did.

Some of Kennedy’s most famous phrases turned out to have long, unacknowledged pedigrees. “The New Frontier,” a phrase in Kennedy’s 1960 acceptance speech that he later used to describe his domestic agenda, was the title of a chapter in a 1936 book written by Kansas Governor Alfred M. Landon, who ran for president as a Republican that year. Two years before that, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s future vice president, Henry Wallace, had written a book titled “New Frontiers.”

The most stirring line of JFK’s inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” echoed similar exhortations made by many others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and President Warren G. Harding, who told the 1916 Republican convention, “We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.”

The inspiration for Kennedy’s famous observation, “For of those to whom much is given, much is required” can be found in Luke 12:48: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”

And when the United States made Winston Churchill an honorary citizen in 1963, Kennedy said of Britain’s former prime minister: “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Nine years earlier, journalist Edward R. Murrow had said of Churchill, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.”

Even when he did cite his sources, Kennedy routinely got them wrong. For example, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality” is a quotation he attributed to Dante. Dante did say some things about hell, but this wasn’t among them. On another occasion, Kennedy quoted Emerson as having said, “What we are speaks louder than what we say,” a condensation of Emerson’s actual thought: “Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”

Journalist Sander Vanocur said Kennedy liked to quote British statesman Lord Morley’s observation that “Life in politics is one continuous choice between second bests.” No source can be found for this attribution. To make the point that we must plan not just for our time but for posterity, Kennedy would often quote “the great French Marshal Lyautey” who, he said, once asked his gardener to plant a tree. When the gardener cautioned that the tree wouldn’t mature for a century, JFK said the marshal replied, “In that case there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon.” Library of Congress researchers couldn’t verify this story.

Nor could they find in Nikita Khrushchev’s speeches or writings, “The survivors will envy the dead,” an observation about nuclear war that Kennedy attributed to the Soviet premier during a 1963 news conference. (Three years before Kennedy so quoted Khrushchev, military strategist Herman Kahn had published a book on nuclear war in which he repeatedly asked, “Will the living envy the dead?”)

But Kennedy did launch, if not originate, a number of comments that became standard parts of our lexicon. In a 1961 executive order, he referred to the need for “affirmative steps.” This was the precursor to what came to be known as affirmative action. JFK also was the first U.S. official to talk about “light at the end of the tunnel” with reference to Vietnam, though the phrase was hardly original to him. And in a mid-1963 speech, Kennedy referred to the economic notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” prefacing this thought with the words: “As they say on my own Cape Cod . . .”

Without claiming they were his own words, Kennedy put a number of quotations into play that were subsequently attributed to him. When taking responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he said, “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” (This saying had appeared in the published 1942 diary of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s foreign minister, then in the 1951 movie “The Desert Fox.”) Similarly, in a 1961 speech, Kennedy said, “Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency,” another now routinely credited to him, though of unknown origin.

One quip by JFK that has no known antecedent is his comment at a 1962 White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. told author Thurston Clarke that his draft of Kennedy’s speech for this dinner had included a tortured passage on Jefferson’s many talents and achievements, and that Kennedy himself came up with the pithier, more memorable remark.

By Mike Leonard

One of author Ralph Keyes’ favorite examples of the erroneous or spurious attribution of quotes is the oft-repeated line, “Show me the money!” from the movie, “Jerry Maguire.”

Sports agent Drew Rosenhaus worked as a consultant for screenwriter and director Cameron Crowe and immediately took credit for the catch phrase when the film became a hit.

Agent Leigh Steinberg also worked as a consultant on the movie and told a different story – that he fed the gist of the quotation to Crowe, based upon what a client of his once said.

Crowe then went on record saying he formed Steinberg’s nugget into the pithy “Show me the money!” The respected Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations credits Crowe.

“In fact,” Keyes said from his Yellow Springs, Ohio, home last week, “that phrase shows up all over the place in newspapers from the early twentieth century. It’s a boxer’s catch phrase that’s a century old.”

Keyes explains all of this in his book to be released this week, “The Quote Verifier.” He not only corrects the record on dozens and dozens of familiar quotes but in many cases takes the reader through the process he went through to discover the earliest author of various famous quotations, the first version of the quotation or to indeed verify that a famous quote did come from the famous person attached to it.

Keyes, a freelance author, delved into some of this territory with his previous book, “Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings and Familiar Quotations.” The title refers to the genesis of the quote attributed to the legendary baseball manager, Leo Durocher, which most people know as “Nice guys finish last.”

What actually happened, Keyes learned, was that Brooklyn Dodgers radio announcer Red Barber had asked Durocher why he couldn’t be a nice guy for a change. Durocher reportedly pointed toward the New York Giants’ dugout and said, “The nice guys are all over there – in seventh place.” Over time, the comment evolved into the all-purpose quotation we commonly hear today.

That kind of editing is common with famous quotes. People intentionally or unintentionally improve or refine a memorable thought or phrase. Then, typically, the quote gets attributed to someone famous.

For example, various people have been cited as the author of the quotation: “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business’” The almost-accurate citation is former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas, who died of lymphoma. Keyes tracked it back to a friend of Tsongas who made the observation to his terminally ill colleague and Tsongas repeated it.

“Famous quotes need famous mouths,” Keyes observed. “Practically speaking, no one’s going to say, ‘In the words of Arnold Zack …’”

“If you see something attributed to Lincoln or Churchill, be suspicious,” said Anthony Shipps, the retired Indiana University librarian whom Keyes calls “the grand old man of quote verification.”

Shipps’ 1990 book, “The Quote Sleuth,” reset the bar for accurate quote verification and illustrated just how lacking existing quotation resources had been. He’s still working on his magnum opus, “Another Place to Look,” but acknowledges that the research is tedious and slow-going.

“The thing most people don’t realize is that sources such as Bartlett’s or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are riddled with errors,” Keyes said. “When I first got into this, I was surprised to find errors in those works. Now I know it’s common knowledge among what I call quotographers that those publications do not live up to their reputations.

“There are a lot of things on those books that are good and right,” said Keyes. “I like to tell people they’re the best place to start, but not necessarily the best place to finish if you want to be certain.”

By James Kilpatrick

In 1953 the New York Yankees won their fifth World Series in a row. Their popular catcher, Yogi Berra, took it in stride. “It’s deja vu all over again,” he said.

The trouble is, he never said it. It’s also probable that he never said of a particular restaurant, “It’s so crowded nobody goes there any more.” And if Berra was the first to remark that “the future ain’t what it used to be,” the evidence is hard to come by. More to the point, Berra is among hundreds of well-known figures who now stand exposed for never having said the snappy things they are said to have said.

For this exercise in debunkery let us applaud word maven Ralph Keyes. His delightful compendium of dubious quotations, “The Quote Verifier,” was just published by St. Martin’s Griffin. No one who writes or speaks for a living should be without it.

As a sometime member of that tribe, I willingly confess our debt to the apt quotation. Nothing serves the role of parsley on our platters quite so well as an attributed piece of penetrating wit. And if Emerson never said it or Oscar Wilde never wrote it — well, they might have said it, or said the same thing differently. Thus misquotations spread their crabgrass roots, and we show-off scribes tend to write, as this one recently wrote, that Mies van der Rohe said that in architecture “less is more.” Yes, he said it, but as Keyes reminds us, Robert Browning said it first.

When it comes to quotations, writers are served poorly by their memories. Often we gild our quotable lilies. Keyes calls it “bumper-stickering,” a process in which “misremembered quotations often improve upon real ones.” We quote Winston Churchill’s warning of “blood, sweat and tears.” He actually spoke of “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” which lacked the prime minister’s usual sense of sis-boom-bah. In the same fashion, sportswriters long ago tarted up Leo Durocher’s famous comment on baseball’s losers. What Durocher actually said was, “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.” His words of wisdom returned from the rewrite laundry as “Nice guys finish last.”

Famous quotations are not only misquoted, they also are often misattributed. It is a kind of social climbing by allusion. A funny malaprop is lots funnier if Samuel Goldwyn or Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde said it first. (Wilde often really did say it first.) Keyes calls a roll of celebrities who have inherited part of their reputations by osmosis: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Pope, Disraeli, Lincoln, Twain, Shaw, and especially Emerson and Franklin.

It appears that Franklin seldom met a good line that he couldn’t cheerfully steal. Thus he put in the mouth of “Poor Richard” a few plums of somebody else’s wisdom, e.g., “There are no gains without pains” and “Early to bed and early to rise make a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” The aphorisms were at least a century old before larcenous Ben latched on to them.

Such misappropriation works best, says Keyes, “if the person quoted is not around to correct the record.” Thomas Jefferson constantly is credited with things he never said — such as remarking upon a society that “pays plumbers more than teachers.” There were no “plumbers,” as such, in Jefferson’s time.

Who said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”? Who knows? It’s a great line, often attributed to Edmund Burke, but no scholar yet has found it in anything Burke ever wrote. It has to be credited to that famous master of the cryptic phrase, Alfred Nonymous.

Oh, and by the way, those lilies in Act IV of “King John” weren’t gilded. It was gold that Shakespeare gilded. The lilies were painted. You could look it up.

By Jan Freeman

AS COMMENCEMENT SEASON peaks this month, students across the nation are hearing, from keynote speakers great and small, the recycled wisdom of their forebears. And those speakers, in turn, are carrying on a grand tradition of quotemongers through the ages: Spreading misinformation far and wide.

At Boston University last Sunday, for instance, Les Moonves, the president of CBS, quoted John Lennon to the assembled throng: ”Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans.”

Senator Bill Frist, encouraging graduates-to-be at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, quoted Margaret Mead: ”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.”

And Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, promised the audience at Wake Forest University that he would follow ”Winston Churchill’s sage advice” on public speaking: ”Be clear. Be concise. Be seated.”

You could look it up (as James Thurber, and then Casey Stengel, said), but could you trust the source? As Ralph Keyes explains in his new book, ”The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When” (St. Martin’s Griffin), even the most respectable sources can get attributions wrong, and the less respectable don’t even try to get them right.

That line Moonves quoted does appear in a Lennon song, for instance-but it doesn’t originate there. Keyes found it attributed to Allen Saunders (creator of the comic strip ”Mary Worth”) in a 1957 Reader’s Digest-though you wouldn’t want to take that as the last word on the subject.

Frist had the right wording for Margaret Mead’s most famous ”quotation,” but, says Keyes, nobody has ever been able to show, ”despite copious research,” that she ever said or wrote it. As for Churchill, he-like Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln-is what Keyes calls a ”flypaper figure,” a personage so famously quotable that lesser wags’ witticisms and anonymous maxims, like the one Warner used, get stuck to him.

Why is it so easy to go wrong? ”Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them,” writes Keyes. A good line-like ”any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and anyone who is still a socialist at 40 has no head”-deserves a Churchill (or a Disraeli or a Bismarck). Unfortunately, the sentiment originated with a French statesman named Francois Guizot. Who wants to quote Francois Guizot?

Keyes’s mission, however, is not just to winnow the true from the false, but also to show why eternal vigilance, in the realm of quotations, is the price of accuracy. He explores how misquotations and misattributions germinate and spread, and how hard it can be to hack through the thicket of conventional wisdom to find the truth.

Even reference books are not infallible, says Keyes. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations had Leo Durocher saying ”Nice guys finish last” long after Keyes had corrected that wording in his 1993 book, ”Nice Guys Finish Seventh.” One edition of Bartlett’s misquoted Milton; Cassell’s Companion to Quotations cited a nonexistent speech by Twain.

The Internet, as Keyes notes, is potentially both help and hindrance in the search. On the one hand, it speeds misinformation around the globe; on the Internet, a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can boot up its computer, as Twain or Churchill or Shaw didn’t say. On the other, the increasing wealth of primary sources on the Web will make it easier for quotation sleuths to prove-or disprove-longstanding attributions.

And perhaps caution is catching on in the quotation racket. In the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, hot off the presses, many of the quotes come with explanations of sourcing and context. Its editors, like Keyes, point out that Emerson’s famous ”build a better mousetrap” is only semi-sourced, recalled by someone who once heard him lecture. And they remind readers that it wasn’t Robert Frost himself, but a speaker in his poem, who believed that ”Good fences make good neighbors.”

But it won’t be easy to get public speakers to abandon their time-tested aphorisms in favor of mere accuracy. ”As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand,” said the 19th-century humorist Josh Billings. At least, a lot of quotation collectors hope he did.

Editor & Publisher

By Dave Astor

Curious about the origin of such phrases as “Journalism is the first draft of history”? Then you should check out The Quote Verifier. Ralph Keyes’ book – slated to be published May 30 by St. Martin’s Griffin – looks at the roots of the “first draft” quote and 459 other well-known sayings. Nine of the 460 are directly journalism-related, while several others loosely apply.

Keyes, the author of 14 books, has worked as a journalist himself – including a 1968-70 stint at Newsday in Melville, N.Y. Now an Ohio resident, Keyes discovered while researching his new tome that roughly two-thirds of the 460 sayings were either misworded (often to make them shorter and more graceful) or misattributed. In numerous cases, a famous person is credited with a quote actually coined by a lesser-known individual.

And many of the sayings date back further than people realize, Keyes tells E&P. For instances, “Show me the money” didn’t originate with the 1996 film Jerry Maguire; rather, it came out of the mouths of at least two boxers who fought in the early 20th century.

But what about those journalistic quotes? Discussing the “first draft” comment, Keyes writers in his upcoming book: “Some thing it originated with former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Others credit Post publisher Katharine Graham. In fact, it was Philip Graham – Bradlee’s boss, Katharine’s husband, and her predecessor as Post publisher – who made a somewhat more turgid exhortation to Newsweek correspondents soon after his newspaper acquired that magazine in 1963: “So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand.”

Keyes also provided E&P with the eight other press-quote passages from his book. Here are three of them:

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. “In the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, an H.L. Mencken-like newspaper editor says, ‘It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Credit for this credit gets passed around. In his 1942 quotation collection, Mencken attributed the saying as ‘author unidentified’ – although Mencken himself is sometimes thought to have been that author. (He was prone to quoting himself anonymously.)  Four decades before Mencken’s collection was published, however, Finley Peter Dunne wrote this observation by his philosophizing bartender, Mr. Dooley: “The newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis force an’ th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead and’ roasts thim aftherward.”

When a dog bites a man, that isn’t news. When a man bites a dog, that’s news. “By legend this was the response of New York Sun city editor John Bogart (1845-1921) to a cub reporter who, in the early 1880s, asked him to define ‘news.’ The author of a 1918 history of the Sun credited Bogart with this comment. It was recalled when he died in 1921. The observation has also been attributed to Sun editor Charles A. Dana; to its first managing editor, Amos Cummings; and to early-20th-cenury British press baron Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth). Whoever first defined news as ‘man-bites-dog’ may have got that notion from Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog.’ In this 1977 poem, a kindly man in Islington is bitten by a dog whom he’d befriended. To the consternation of all, ‘The man recovered of the bite/The dog it was that died.’ This popular bit of doggerel was adapted in many forms, including one in which a man actually bit a dog. Lexicographer Eric Partridge believed that this might have inspired the classic definition of news.

You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. “As the Spanish-American War was about to erupt, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst sent sketch artist Frederick Remington to portray the action in revolutionary Cuba. After spending a few days there, Remington wired that he could find no hostilities and wanted to return. Hearst is notorious for responding, ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.’ There is no reliable evidence that the published sent any such telegram. He himself denied having done so. The wire in question has never been found.  As Hearst biographer John K. Winkler pointed out, it is unlikely that such an inflammatory message would have gotten past Spanish censors. The source of Hearst’s pithy telegram seems to have been a 1901 memoir by journalist James Creelman, a Hearst admirer who reported the publisher’s order to Remington without giving any source.”

Non-press quotes and misquotes discussed in Keyes’ book include “The whole nine yards,” “Ain’t I a woman?,” “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple,” and hundreds of others.

By Louis Menand

Ralph Keyes [is] a quotation specialist and the author of “The Quote Verifier” (St. Martin’s; $15.95). “Misquotation is an occupational hazard of quotation,” Keyes advises, and both he and [Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred] Shapiro have gone to considerable trouble to track down the original utterances that became famous quotations and their original utterers. Keyes finds that quotations tend to mutate in the direction of greater pith. He offers the original words of Rodney King as an instance: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? . . . Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.” This is the rambling outburst that became the astringent and immortal “Can’t we all get along?” Keyes calls the process “bumper-stickering.” It worked well for Rodney King.

And last Monday I cited a quotation which I attributed to P.T. Barnum. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Well, it turns out it wasn’t Barnum, and Ralph Keyes caught it, as well he should. He’s the author of the just published book, The Quote Verifier, which examines the roots of some 450 such sayings, ranging from ain’t I a woman, to show me the money.

So we’ve called him on it. We reached Ralph Keyes at his home near Dayton, Ohio, and thanks very much for being with us today.

Mr. RALPH KEYES (Author): Thanks for having me.

CONAN: So it wasn’t P.T. Barnum?

Mr. KEYES: It was not.

CONAN: Who…

Mr. KEYES: It was H.L. Mencken.

CONAN: H.L. Mencken. Well, I had somebody beginning with two letters for their name.

Mr. KEYES: Very close.

CONAN: I understand that a lot of loose floating quotes get attributed to either H.L. Mencken or P.T. Barnum.

Mr. KEYES: Yes, I call them flypaper figures. Like Lincoln, Twain, Shaw, Churchill, Wilde. These are people to whom orphan quotes stick.

CONAN: And orphan quotes, these are people, orphan quotes, these are sayings that people think are incredibly clever and therefore must have come from the likes of Mark Twain.

Mr. KEYES: Exactly. Something like, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

CONAN: Who said that?

Mr. KEYES: Obviously Vince Lombardi must have said that. We’ve all heard of him.

CONAN: Um-hmm.

Mr. KEYES: But it was actually Red Sanders(ph), a coach at UCLA in the early ’50s who originated that one. But who’s heard of Red Sanders?

CONAN: Well, in your e-mail you mention another well-known line, a bit more contemporary. The movie Jerry McGuire has to be the source of show me the money.

Mr. KEYES: Well, of course. It’s in there.

CONAN: Uh-huh.

Mr. KEYES: And Cameron Crowe is the screenwriter for Jerry McGuire, and Bartlett’s actually attributes Cameron Crowe with having coined that. It’s even on their back jacket.

But there are a lot of databases now where you can enter key words and they’ll take you back to early newspapers and early magazines. I did that, and I found show me the money was early boxer parlance in the early 20th century. For example, in 1907, when he was asked if he’d fight Jack Johnson, the heavyweight Tommy Burns said, Show me the money! Show me the money and I’ll fight, if its enough!

CONAN: He came to regret that.

Mr. KEYES: Oh, yes. With Jack Johnson.

(Soundbite of laughter)

But that catch phrase, show me the money, it’s a century old, at least.

CONAN: This is Independence Day. Are there any misattributed famous quotations from the American Revolution? I mean, surely Patrick Henry did say, give me liberty or give me death?

Mr. KEYES: Unfortunately, he didn’t.

CONAN: No!

Mr. KEYES: Yeah. There’s a guy named William Wirt(ph) who was a biographer, very flowery, very willing to put words in his subjects’ mouths. And when he wrote a biography of Patrick Henry, he put give me liberty or give me death in Henry’s mouth.

Now, Henry was supposed to have said that at a convention in Virginia in March, 1775. Jefferson and Washington were both present at that convention, and neither of them ever remembered Henry having made that, you know, momentous declaration.

CONAN: Haven’t you ever heard of the journalistic principle of a story too good to check? Aren’t there quotes too good to check?

Mr. KEYES: Somebody think – some people think Twain said that.

CONAN: Ralph Keyes, thanks very much.

Mr. KEYES: Thank you.

CONAN: Ralph Keyes is the author of The Quote Verifier: Who Said That, Where and When. He joined us from his home near Dayton, Ohio.

By James Kilpatrick

In 1953 the New York Yankees won their fifth World Series in a row. Their popular catcher, Yogi Berra, took it in stride. “It’s deja vu all over again,” he said.

The trouble is, he never said it. It’s also probable that he never said of a particular restaurant, “It’s so crowded nobody goes there any more.” And if Berra was the first to remark that “the future ain’t what it used to be,” the evidence is hard to come by. More to the point, Berra is among hundreds of well-known figures who now stand exposed for never having said the snappy things they are said to have said.

For this exercise in debunkery let us applaud word maven Ralph Keyes. His delightful compendium of dubious quotations, “The Quote Verifier,” was just published by St. Martin’s Griffin. No one who writes or speaks for a living should be without it.

As a sometime member of that tribe, I willingly confess our debt to the apt quotation. Nothing serves the role of parsley on our platters quite so well as an attributed piece of penetrating wit. And if Emerson never said it or Oscar Wilde never wrote it — well, they might have said it, or said the same thing differently. Thus misquotations spread their crabgrass roots, and we show-off scribes tend to write, as this one recently wrote, that Mies van der Rohe said that in architecture “less is more.” Yes, he said it, but as Keyes reminds us, Robert Browning said it first.

When it comes to quotations, writers are served poorly by their memories. Often we gild our quotable lilies. Keyes calls it “bumper-stickering,” a process in which “misremembered quotations often improve upon real ones.” We quote Winston Churchill’s warning of “blood, sweat and tears.” He actually spoke of “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” which lacked the prime minister’s usual sense of sis-boom-bah. In the same fashion, sportswriters long ago tarted up Leo Durocher’s famous comment on baseball’s losers. What Durocher actually said was, “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.” His words of wisdom returned from the rewrite laundry as “Nice guys finish last.”

Famous quotations are not only misquoted, they also are often misattributed. It is a kind of social climbing by allusion. A funny malaprop is lots funnier if Samuel Goldwyn or Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde said it first. (Wilde often really did say it first.) Keyes calls a roll of celebrities who have inherited part of their reputations by osmosis: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Pope, Disraeli, Lincoln, Twain, Shaw, and especially Emerson and Franklin.

It appears that Franklin seldom met a good line that he couldn’t cheerfully steal. Thus he put in the mouth of “Poor Richard” a few plums of somebody else’s wisdom, e.g., “There are no gains without pains” and “Early to bed and early to rise make a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” The aphorisms were at least a century old before larcenous Ben latched on to them.

Such misappropriation works best, says Keyes, “if the person quoted is not around to correct the record.” Thomas Jefferson constantly is credited with things he never said — such as remarking upon a society that “pays plumbers more than teachers.” There were no “plumbers,” as such, in Jefferson’s time.

Who said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”? Who knows? It’s a great line, often attributed to Edmund Burke, but no scholar yet has found it in anything Burke ever wrote. It has to be credited to that famous master of the cryptic phrase, Alfred Nonymous.

Oh, and by the way, those lilies in Act IV of “King John” weren’t gilded. It was gold that Shakespeare gilded. The lilies were painted. You could look it up.

Ralph Keyes is the author of fifteen books, but in some ways his most recent one—“I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech”—seems like the one he was born to write. Having authored the 1977 exploration “Is There Life After High School?” (which was adapted into a musical that ran briefly on Broadway, and is still regularly produced around the country) and boasting an impressive, unexpected personal collection of vintage toasters, Keyes is clearly fascinated with the past. This latest book puts that preoccupation to practical use, giving us a tour of the often strange and sticky origins of the things we say—and can’t stop saying.

“I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a guide to the traces of history that lace our daily conversations, bringing together a vast array of “retroterms” with wildly different meanings and origins. These “verbal fossils”—like “red tape,” “carpetbagger,” “the 800-pound gorilla,” and “ditto”—all have their own stories, which often fall away after they start being regularly used. As we get further from their sources, we become more alienated from what we’re saying.

The past sneaks into our present in unexpected ways, and often we don’t even realize our part in perpetuating it. There’s something poignant about the idea that so much of what we say derives from things that are lost, obsolete, or misunderstood. “I Love it When You Talk Retro” is a dictionary of pseudo-foreign phrases, a bridge between generations, and a serious treat for word nerds. I talked to Keyes about why retroterms matter, why Boomers speak in code, and why we’re all still haunted by high school.

You look at a huge number of terms in this book. How did you choose which ones to explore?

For years I’ve been jotting things down as I heard them. I’d think, “How would my kids know what that means? How would a new immigrant understand the context of that phrase?” Whenever I would hear something that raised that question, I’d make a note of it. Eventually it was a list of thousands.

From there, what was your research process like?

I started out planning to do pop culture: TV shows, song lyrics, old ads. The more I got into it, the more I realized how many words and phrases went a lot further back than that. The book just about killed me. I ended up with a manuscript about three times as long as it was supposed to be.

Many of the phrases I was thinking about were the ones you think everyone knows—like “waiting for the other shoe to drop”—but invariably, you find out they don’t. Or they might know what it means, but they don’t know where it came from. Then I began to see ones I hadn’t heard of myself: Paul Krugman wrote, “There must be a pony in there somewhere,” as a way of referring to unwarranted optimism. I’d never heard of it before, so I looked it up and found a huge number of references to this story: A young boy is confronted by a huge mound of manure, and rather than being put off like most of us, he dives right in. Someone asks him why, and he says, “With this much manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere.”

I’ve been keeping more recent track of Maureen Dowd—I call her the Queen of Retrotalk, because she’s constantly using retroterms. But she’s not unique. Reporters of a certain age are constantly tossing around these Boomer-era allusions as if everyone knows what they refer to.

It’s partly a matter of style: She’s trying to brand herself as a certain kind of writer with a certain kind of knowledge. I guess she assumes that it’s an advantage, but you’re pointing out that it can really be alienating.

I compare it to talking to someone who’s always throwing French or Latin phrases into conversation. It always makes me feel left out and ignorant. I think, in a way, that’s part of the point—when those of my generation make reference to things that we grew up with, we’re as much as saying to people a lot younger than us, “This is a private conversation. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, the heck with you. Haven’t you got some twittering to do?” It becomes a kind of a generational freeze-out, a way of, probably unconsciously, celebrating generational solidarity–especially for Boomers.

How important do you think it is for us to know the roots of these expressions? Well, it keeps you in the conversation.

I don’t think it’s an imperative. It makes you more cognizant of what’s being discussed around you. And it’s more fun to know what they refer to: we get the gist of a lot of these things, but we don’t necessarily know their origins.

I knew what “gerrymander” meant—to fiddle with the shape of a congressional district to favor one candidate or another—but I had no idea where it came from. It turns out it goes back to the early 19th century, when the governor of Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry, presided over a redistricting and some very weirdly shaped districts [resulted]. A cartoonist drew a picture of a congressional district shaped like a salamander, and he called it the “Gerry-mander.” It caught on. A lot of these phrases come out of events, and then they’re kind of fun to say, and nothing better comes along to replace them, so we still talk about them.

The Boomers’ frame of reference is very TV-centric, because they spent so much time in front of the television. It raises an interesting question: What will be the retroterms of the Internet generation? My son, who’s 23, spends a lot more time in front of a computer screen than a TV screen. Probably a lot of the phrases he’ll use will confound his grandkids, and will come out of the Internet and computer-ese.

It does seem like a never-ending cycle of misunderstandings.

My kids are seven years apart—one’s 30 and one’s 23—and I think phrases familiar to the older one aren’t necessarily familiar to the younger one. It used to take a generation for terms to become obsolete, but as everything else is accelerating, I think the rate at which terms become obsolete has accelerated.

At the same time, the Internet keeps a more public, centralized record of what things used to mean, which could be helpful.

Yeah, it’s so easy to look things up now. That was one problem I had writing this book. I’ve been writing word or quotation-oriented books for a couple of decades, but twenty years ago it meant a lot of traipsing around the library, making phone calls, reading old magazines and newspapers—which was very demanding, but it was a real detective game. Then, the challenge was to maximize your data. Now you have a whole different challenge, which is to minimize, to put borders on what you’re accessing.

What inspired you to write your book “Is There Life After High School?”

I had all these strong leftover feelings about high school, and my classmates, about what happened to me there, and what I wish had happened. I remember walking down the path to the mailbox and coming back with an envelope that said up in the corner “CHS Class of ’62,” and I opened it up and unfolded this piece of paper and it said, “Reunion Time!” This was ten years after I’d graduated. My hands started trembling, my heart started pounding, my cheeks were flushed. I was struck by how strong my feelings were, my ambivalence about going to a reunion. I mean, for crying out loud, it’s high school, ten years ago—why is my heart racing?

I started talking to friends and reading up on celebrities about their high school experiences. Everyone I talked to had their own memories and resentments and second thoughts and regrets, things they wish they hadn’t said, things they wish they had said, people they wish they could have gone out with, fights they wish they had won…the list is endless. I called up Robert Logue, and said, “Mr. Logue, I hear you’re the guy who beat Richard Nixon for Senior Class president at Whittier High School in the 30’s.” There was a long pause at the other end of the line. He says, “That was student body president.” So we really do remember, and I was really able to unload the weight of my high school memories by writing that book.

Tell me about your toaster collection. Why toasters?

My mother-in-law had this gorgeous, shiny sunbeam toaster from 1938. I always admired it. One day we went to visit her and the toaster wasn’t in the kitchen. I asked where it was, and she said, “Oh, it broke, I threw it down the incinerator.” That turns out to be a common collectors’ syndrome, where something you really wanted got away from you, and you try to replace it. So I kept my eyes open for other toasters. There are serious toaster collectors out there; they have a toaster collectors association, they have a newsletter, they hold conventions. I try to just have fun with it, and I try not to spend too much money on my toasters. As you can see from the pictures, I’ve got, I think, about sixty at this point. I also have hairdryers and blenders and cocktail shakers and waffle irons and stuff like that.

I think I’m a 30’s guy, even though I was born in ‘45. There’s something about that whole pre-war era that fascinates me. Some of the design of the early toasters is phenomenal—they’re just chrome-y and curvy and shiny…I just like them. And I love showing off my toasters to visitors to our house. We go down to the basement, and there’s this reaction like, “what in the world are you collecting toasters for?” But they love to go over there and see, “Oh, we used to have one like this!”

Incidentally, I tried to get a book together called the “Tao of Toasters,” about the role toasters play in our culture. My agent didn’t think she could sell it.

***

Eryn Loeb has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Bookforum, the L Magazine, and Bitch Magazine, among other publications, and is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine. Since 2005, she has written the ”Girl, Interrupting” column for Bookslut.com, taking a monthly look at how feminism lives (and dies) on the page. She lives in New York.

David Hunter

A free book landed in my post office box last week. Sending free books to people who might mention them in print is an accepted form of bribery in the world of literature and journalism. Technically, it’s corruption, but there’s no obligation on the part of the recipient to mention a book, and the publishers view it as a profitable practice or they wouldn’t do it.

You would be surprised how many books find their way to me out here to the backwaters of Knox County in the Powell community. In this particular case, the book deals with a subject I’ve addressed on more than one occasion in my weekly column. Apparently I ended up on somebody’s mailing list because nothing on the Internet ever goes away. The World Wide Web has become a sort of collective memory for the human race.

The title of the book is “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where and When.” It’s from St. Martin’s imprint, a Griffin trade paperback original. The author, Ralph Keyes, previously wrote a similar book called “Nice Guys Finish Seventh,” which I also own and have mentioned before. Quotation sleuths create valuable tools for writers. It’s difficult to verify a quote, even with the Internet at our disposal, and Keyes has done a superb job of researching the subject.

Almost always, when I open a book like this one, I find out that I have been guilty of attributing sayings to the wrong people. For instance, I have attributed the following quote to Mark Twain on more than one occasion because I found him listed as the original source: “A fanatic is always the fellow that is on the other side.” I was surprised to find that it came from Will Rogers. On the other hand, I’ve attributed this one to Rogers, “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example,” when Twain really said it.

Ronald Reagan is often attributed with having first said – because he used it without a source – “If not us, who? If not now, when?” Keyes dug out the following quote from Hillel the Elder, a Jewish leader who lived in the first century: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” It could be a coincidence, but more likely Reagan’s speech writers didn’t know the source.

“If you love something set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.” This quote became a veritable anthem of the 1960s and 1970s, appearing on everything from posters to key chains. Despite numerous theories, Keyes eventually listed the source of the quotation as, “Yet to be determined.” I once saw a T-shirt for sale in a cop magazine that said: “If you love something set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, you can always hunt it down and shoot it.”

Richard Burton once referred to his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” This, no doubt, set some hearts fluttering at Burton’s poetic side. However, it’s more likely that the actor was listening to the radio in 1939 after Russia invaded Poland, and Winston Churchill said: “I cannot forecast to you the action of the Russians. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interests.”

I was disappointed to find that Keyes has debunked a couple of my favorite George Bernard Shaw quotes: “It is very easy to give up smoking. I have done it hundreds of times.” I will especially miss, “Experience is the name we give our mistakes.” On the bright side, Shaw did say, after being told by a heckler that one of his plays was rotten: “You and I know that, but who are we among so many?”

“The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where and When” will cost you $15.95 – unless you can find a deal on the Internet or talk the publisher into giving you a free copy. If I didn’t already have a copy, I’d pay that much. It’s a bargain for anyone who loves to spice up his or her original words with a little outside genius.

By Jerome Weeks

We know Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam.” But neither did Josef Stalin ever make such cynical observations as “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic” and “No man, no problem.” In his ingenious new book, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where and When, Ralph Keyes doesn’t provide just the origins of several hundred well-known lines but their history – who altered or improved them, why someone else got credit. 

Misquoter in chief

John F. Kennedy quoted more people than any other modern president and misquoted them, too, says Mr. Keyes, and thus led future reference works astray. Kennedy cited Edmund Burke for the famous observation, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” But no one has ever located it in Burke’s writings.

Man talk

”A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” Which ought to include getting his attributions straight. That manly piece of circular reasoning is often credited to John Wayne in Stagecoach. Nope. Try The Grapes of Wrath and not the movie version, either, says The Quote Verifier. But the odds are it was already a longtime catchphrase when novelist John Steinbeck got ahold of it.

Ralph Keyes

Our national conversation is filled with historical allusions: Ponzi schemes, smoke-filled rooms, talking turkey, even Harry and Louise (to say nothing of Thelma and Louise). Those who know the history of these allusions tend to assume everyone else does. But everyone doesn’t. Younger inquiring minds want to know: Who was Hobson and what was his choice? Why does zipless have sexual overtones? What’s the big deal about drinking Kool-Aid? And who is this Cher Noble that newscasters keep referring to when they discuss nuclear power plants?

When we use such retro-references, history provides the platform that we speak from. Or, one might say, the stump. Early settlers who saw Indian leaders addressing tribe members while standing on a stump adopted the practice themselves, giving what we still call stump speeches.

Much political terminology is rooted in long-forgotten events, reaching as far back as Elbridge Gerry. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and onetime vice president, as governor of Massachusetts Gerry presided over the redrawing of his state’s congressional districts in 1812. Gerry’s party designed these districts to favor themselves. Their results were quite creative. A Boston Gazette cartoon portrayed one reconfigured district shaped like a dragon-salamander. It was called “the Gerry-mander: A New Species of Monster.” This term caught the public’s fancy. Converted to a verb, gerrymander is what we still call the tortured redrawing of electoral districts to favor those in power. It is a classic retroterm.

Retroterms refer to events from our past that made a big enough impression to stick around in memory. They are an excellent barometer of what mattered most to us during a given period of history: what resonated, struck our fancy, or simply tickled our funny bone.

One colonial-era tale involved a white hunter and an Indian hunter who join forces to shoot several crows and wild turkeys. When it comes time to divide their catch, the white man gives his companion all the crows while keeping every turkey. The incensed Indian protests. “You talk all turkey for you,” he says. “You never once talk turkey for me! Now I talk turkey to you.” The Indian then takes his fair share of turkeys. This story was so popular in nineteenth-century America that talk turkey became synonymous with getting down to business.

Unlike turkey, crow is a notoriously unappetizing bird. At one time stories involving crow were a staple of American humor. For example: If lost in the woods, (1) Catch a crow. (2) Boil for a week with one of your boots. (3) Eat the boot. After the Civil War, those forced to admit an error were said to eat boiled crow. In 1885 an American magazine told its readers “To ‘eat crow’ means to recant, or to humiliate oneself.” It still does.

Such allusions are part and parcel of what I call retrotalk: conversational allusions to past phenomena. Even though American discourse is filled with historical references we assume “everyone’s heard of,” everyone hasn’t. Those who were born after what’s alluded to took place, who grew up in another country, or who simply don’t know what it refers to, get left out in the conversational cold. This suggests yet another reason for giving history greater prominence in our educational systems: Not just for its own inherent value but to facilitate conversation among young and old, historians and lay persons, the newly-arrived and those already here.

Most know that “The buck stops here” refers to the final point of responsibility. It’s common knowledge that this retrophrase comes from the old expression pass the buck. Far fewer realize that this phrase originated among frontier poker players who circulated a buck knife among themselves to indicate whose turn it was to deal and, presumably, to defend themselves if another player didn’t like the cards he was dealt. Timid souls who preferred not to deal at all passed the buck.

Barrels form the basis of an important subset of retrotalk. On nineteenth-century British ships, a wooden cask, or butt, held drinking water. Its lid had a dipping hole called a scuttle. The two pieces combined were called a scuttlebutt. As would later be true of office workers sipping water from water coolers, sailors commonly shared gossip beside these containers while quenching their thirst. In time scuttlebutt itself became synonymous with gossip, rumors, or inside information.

Other barrels aboard sailing ships held salted meat. Fat left over after that meat was cooked was called slush. Sometimes this rendered fat was sold to landlubbers on shore. The proceeds went into a slush fund to benefit crew members. Eventually that phrase came to characterize secret funds used for illicit purposes.

Barrels used to store pork used to be a common sight in American homes. The fuller the barrel, the richer its owner. Poor folks sometimes had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. That type of pig-based terminology is still heard routinely when politicians distribute money. Pork—or bringing home the bacon—signifies largesse. Pork barrel politics is based on accumulating and distributing public resources among backers and constituents.

Telling such stories provides a capital opportunity to relate history to everyday conversation. Word history can’t be divorced from social history. As Bill Bryson wrote in Made in America, “unless we understand the social context in which words are formed . . . we cannot begin to appreciate the richness and vitality of the words that make up our speech.” Rather than simply use retroterms and puzzle many listeners, exploring their origins give us a first-rate teaching moment.

Consider the case of stable owner Thomas Hobson.. A hearty coachman who lived well into his eighties, from 1568 until 1631 Hobson rented some forty horses to Cambridge University students. These young men had a tendency to return Hobson’s horses panting and covered with froth. As a result, his most popular steeds were getting worn out. To remedy this problem, Hobson came up with an ingenious solution. A returned horse went to the farthest stall of his stable, then moved up in turn. Customers could only rent the horse closest to the entryway (i.e., the freshest one). “This one or none” was his policy. Students sarcastically called that Hobson’s choice, meaning no choice at all. Thomas Ward’s 1688 poem “England’s Reformation,” included the line, “Where to elect there is but one, ’tis Hobson’s choice — take that or none.” When Henry Ford said Model T customers could have any color they liked, so long as it was black, he offered them a Hobson’s choice.

Who is credited for saying “You are what you eat?” Karl Marx? According to this amusing A-to-Z compendium of famous sayings, it was actually philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who in 1850 said “Man is what he eats,” but it was French politician Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who a whole quarter century earlier wrote “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” It is morsels of information like this that make up this inexpensive ready-reference source. Keyes (The Post-Truth Era) aims not only to set the record straight about who said what and when but to tell the story of how each quote was conceived and evolved over time

Many expressions we use as adults originated in the playgrounds, classrooms, and empty lots of our childhood. “Say uncle,” “connect the dots,” “stay within the lines,” and “stuck-up” are just a few.

The term hoodwink is left over from another children’s game, blindman’s buff (not “bluff”). In this traditional English game, the it person was blindfolded, slapped on the behind, or “buffed,” then made to stumble about trying to grab other players. Blindfolded participants were said to be hoodwinked. Originally, that term referred to having one’s eyes covered. Over time hoodwink came to mean “trick someone.”

Nowadays, students with digital wristwatches do not understand clockwise, counterclockwise and ‘a quarter to three’. Two forty-five they understand.

“Retroterms” from cootie to scuttlebutt are seldom understood but were often used by the older generation. When we use these terms, it’s with the assumption that everyone understands. However, that’s not always true.

Cootie, for example, is a word for lice that originated as soldier slang in World War I. Ralph Keyes is the author of the book I Love It When You Talk Retro. It takes a look at the stories behind the allusions that have — so far — stood the test of time.

The book takes an entertaining and informative look at the fashion and fads of our language. Today’s 18-year-olds may not know who Mrs. Robinson is, where the term “stuck in a groove” comes from, why 1984 was a year unlike any other.

“Big as a bread box” or what the term Watergate refers to are other examples. The book discusses these verbal fossils that remain embedded in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped off into the sunset.

It could be a person (Mrs. Robinson), product (Edsel), past bestseller (Catch-22), radio or TV show (The Shadow), comic strip (Pogo), or advertisement (Where’s the beef?) which are long forgotten.

The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” is a mystery to young people today, as is “45rpm.” Even older folks don’t know the origins of “raked over the coals” (originally in reference to the treatment of heretics) and “cut to the chase” (originated in the US film industry). Keyes uses his skill as a sleuth of sources to track what he calls “retrotalk”: “a slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena.”

He surveys the origins of “verbal fossils” from commercials (Kodak moment), jurisprudence (Twinkie defense), movies (pod people), cartoons (Caspar Milquetoast) and literature (Brave New World).

Many allusions or idioms come from an old game involving small round spheres made of clay, glass, ceramic, or stone. These, of course, are marbles. Marbles could be used in an infinite variety of games, but — in America, anyway — the most popular involved trying to knock each other’s marbles out of a circle drawn in the dirt.

Those playing this game, usually called Ringer, had to knuckle down, or squat on one knee with a knuckle on the ground, then propel a shooter into the ring from his hand. As adults, we say we’re ready to knuckle down, or get serious, as we once did when marbles were on the line. To knuckle under, on the other hand, is to succumb, much like the marble player yielding to an opponent’s demand that he shoot with knuckles inverted.

Players in some games played for keeps, or “keepsies.” Winners of those games kept every marble they could knock out of the ring. Another way of saying the same thing was going for all the marbles. In Ringer, as in life, this meant aspiring to all or nothing. Losing your marbles was infuriating of course, and is probably why we apply that phrase to out-of-control adults who have lost it.

It is great fun exploring the origins of our expressions

“History is bunk.”

“We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Almost every American knows these famous quotations and who said them. Or do we? That’s the big question Ralph Keyes addresses in his new book, The Quote Verifier.

“Discovering who actually said what, where, and when is a challenge for anyone who wishes to quote others,” Keyes writes in the introduction to his book. Just how much of a challenge is made clear through Keyes’ impressive research that turns up evidence not only of widespread misquotation, but also of misappropriation of even some of our most beloved lines.

Like it or not, Keyes has discovered that many of the familiar lines we sling around so cavalierly are often merely simulacra or condensed versions of what actually was said. Consider the heroic utterance, “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.” Rear Admiral David Farragut said, or more likely shouted, this or something like it as he led the Union fleet through Mobile Bay during the Civil War. The situation was, a ship in the lead had hit a mine, and a ship coming behind had balked at going ahead. If Farragut had been thinking more about posterity instead of about just getting through alive, he might actually have said what is quoted. According to those present, his real words were, “Damn the torpedoes! Four bells! Captain Drayton, go ahead.” Time and history book editors have put more snap into his statement, ensuring its immortality.

Quote tampering can be less flattering as well. Consider the best remembered statement from the lips of automobile pioneer Henry Ford History is bunk.

According to Keyes, it comes from a 1916 interview with Chicago Tribune reporter Charles N. Wheeler, in which Ford was asked about the historical context of his pro-disarmament views. “What do we care what they did five hundred or one thousand years ago? . . . History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.” The three word version, “History is bunk,” Keyes notes, is “just one more unflattering abridgement of a prominent man’s words. ”

Sigmund Freud received similar treatment with his famous quoted statement, “What does a woman want?” This has given posterity the impression that the great founder of psychotherapy really didn’t understand women. Actually, Keyes explains, those words cannot be found in any of Freud’s writings. Rather, they come from scribbled notes of his patient, Marie Bonaparte, during a session with Freud in which Freud was probably remarking about his difficult relationship with his daughter, Anna, and not about women in general. “Freud may not have been so clueless about women, as so many take for granted,” Keyes concludes.

And then there are quotes that are completely misrepresented, such as Ben Franklin’s immortal remark at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” This statement was not made by Franklin, Keyes states. Not only is there no contemporary account of Franklin having said it, but well into the 19th century, the famous pun was attributed to the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, Richard Penn, grandson of William Penn. According to family history, when his revolutionary colleagues told him “we must all hang together,” Penn responded, “If you do not, gentlemen, I can tell you that you will be very apt to hang separately.” This version, according to Keyes, appeared in 1830s accounts. It was an 1840 biography that transferred the quote to Franklin’s mouth. “And there it has stayed,” he writes. Franklin got the last word on the Penns, a family he was often at odds with.

In his book, Keyes ferrets out some 460 famous sayings, each one a mini detective story. He also includes popular sayings such as the George W. Bush’s favorite: “He can run, but he can’t hide” (actually said by a famous black prize fighter) and “make my day” (which dates back at least to 1825). With his fascinating work, Keyes joins a growing army of quote verifiers whom he has dubbed “quotographers,” those determined to clean up the sloppy world of quotation and get to the bottom of just who really did say what.

This book is about saying what we mean without being lewd or crude while still being shrewd.

Prolific American author Ralph Keyes has a love of language — his 15 books include the provocatively titled I Love It When You Talk Retro — and he certainly has the ability to separate the buckwheat from the
other stuff.

He defines a euphemism as “words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy.” The word itself comes from the Greek — “good speaking.”

Books on the English language run the risk of being lists without sufficient context or academic jargon. Keyes avoids both those pitfalls, although his bibliography is 17 pages for those who wish to pursue the topic (and bore their friends and acquaintances).

It is tempting to smirk at the Victorians’ use of “inexpressibles” for trousers and “an interesting condition”
for pregnancy. But a little reflection brings home clearly that we have our own current euphemisms —”disabled” for the previously used crippled, and the myriad terms that have followed.

The pages of this very Free Press no doubt feature a variety of slipperiness from politicians — our ads are “contrast ads,” our opponent’s are “attack ads.”

Each reader will have his favourite section, depending on interest or squeamishness. Keyes covers such topics as food — why eat squid when you can call it calamari? — war (“robust interrogation” for torture) and the always popular topics of sex, death and secretions.

Much to Keyes’s credit, there are a number of LOL moments — laugh out loud, not to be confused with the medical profession’ s blackly humorous acronym for little old lady.

Indeed, the medical euphemisms in the chapter Under the Weather and In the Ground are worth the price of the book to prepare you for your next extended visit to the hospital.

DDD stands for “definitely done dancing,” while GFPO means “good for parts only.”

Keyes started his investigation thinking euphemisms were genteel ways of avoiding unpleasantness and they could be clearly separated from slang, jargon and double entendres. His book convinces that that’s too narrow a view.

Adding to the value of Euphemania is Keyes’ s discussion of words that move from genteel substitute to unacceptable,”‘ Cherry’ was once considered more respectable than ‘ hymen,’ ” Keyes writes. “Now, just the opposite is true.”

Business and political euphemisms have blossomed in our time, suggesting to Keyes that these are the subjects that most concern us. He also believes that we have a deep-seated primitive need to avoid direct speech.

Our ancestors avoided naming the animals they hunted. We avoid the blunt words that refer to death or the sexual terms that can fracture a marriage or relationship (fill in your own term here).

The blunter the language, the more likely it has an Anglo-Saxon root. The more Latin gets involved, the more likely you will speak in euphemisms.

Are all euphemisms bad? Keyes argues no. At worst they are tools for manipulation. As he puts it, “Too much euphemizing fosters an evasive frame of mind, one that tiptoes around issues rather than confronting them.” And an overreliance on them can cloud thought, make problems harder to solve.

On the other hand, no one wants to hear a blunt stream of language in conversation, or on the bus. We accommodate, we oil the wheels of dealing with one another, keeping in mind that there is no satisfactory euphemism to the question “Does my bum look fat in this?”

- Ron Robinson

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” ~Groucho Marx

Malcolm Gladwell’s book about success, Outliers, is still selling like hotcakes. Go figure. Also writing about success, Tara Stiles at Huffington Post sets forth 10 tips for success in what I have to assume is an unintentionally funny post. Drink water and get enough sleep, she writes. Do yoga. Smile. Ms. Stiles seems to have a low threshold for declaring success. Her tips read more like preparation for life as a dancing bear rather than say, director of the FBI.

That Outliers is indeed “selling like hotcakes” reminds me that if you are a word maven, there is a new book that may be of interest: I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech by Ralph Keyes. Check out a NPR interview of Keyes here.

Patrick Henry’s patriotic demand, “Give me liberty or give me death!” is often quoted by freedom seekers today because of its urgent eloquence. Many great sound bites like this one have become quotable quotes too good to pass up, whether they’re about sports (Leo Durocher’s “Nice guys finish last”), or taking responsibility (“The buck stops here” desktop sign that President Truman became known for).

Some well-spoken folks are so quotable they become veritable cottage industries of attributions, like Mark Twain (“Golf is a good walk spoiled”; “Whenever I get the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away”; “It is very easy to give up smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times”). Former baseball star Yogi Berra was so witty he even spawned his own category, Yogi-isms. Such laughable witticisms include “Nobody goes there anymore: it’s too crowded,” and “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

While all these well-circulated sayings are appealing to the ear and mind, they share one common problem: None of the people to whom they’re attributed ever actually said them. At least that’s the claim of The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When, a new book by Ralph Keyes. He extensively examines the origins of hundreds of well-known quotes from historical figures, challenging their veracity and correcting false assumptions. While many of the quotes stand up to his scrutiny, many more do not. If you care whether the words you repeat in speeches, writing, or conversation are accurate, or you just like a fascinating read, check this book out.

Ever ponder how much we rely on euphemisms? I didn’t, until I dipped into “Euphemania” (Little, Brown; $24.99), a new book sure to delight language lovers.

The book, by Ralph Keyes, explores how we use euphemisms as stand-ins for words that evoke fear, unease or embarrassment. And, best of all, it offers hundreds of examples, from antiquity to the present.

Did you know, for instance, that “penis” was a euphemism in Cicero’s time? It’s Latin for tail. But “penis” is what Keyes calls a “fallen euphemism.” “They start out as euphemisms, they’re supposed to be respectable, and then they take on the taint of what they refer to.”

“Disease” is another fallen euphemism. Think “dis-ease” and you see that it was once a gentle term for illness. As you might guess, body parts and sex are the most popular subjects for euphemisms.

“Hiking the Appalachian Trail” is a new favorite in the latter category. Meaning “having an affair,” it was born in 2009, after one of outgoing S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford’s staffers offered it as an explanation for the missing governor’s whereabouts. Keyes likes it, too. “Thank God for Mark Sanford,” he says.
- Pam Kelley

Reading “I Love it When You Talk Retro” by Ralph Keyes … by flickering candlelight

By Jane Baker

We all know that Mark Twain said, “Golf is a good walk spoiled” and “Whenever I feel an urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away” and that Abraham Lincoln said “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client”—right? Wrong! As Ralph Keyes points out in his latest book, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (St. Martin’s Griffin), quotes are often incorrectly attributed to the famous.

In the case of the golf quote, no scholar has been able to verify that Twain actually said it. The line about exercise, also often attributed to Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, was most likely by the humorist J. P. McEvoy. And Lincoln is only one of many credited with making the lawyer remark, for which no source has been identified. Often, to paraphrase (misquote?) Keyes, “quotes migrate from obscure to more prominent mouths.”

Another eye-opener here is the fact that so many “well-known” quotes are actually misquotations, the original phrase having been pared down to catchier and more memorable words. An example: Leo Durocher’s “Nice guys finish last” was originally “The nice guys are all over there. In seventh place.” Over time these words were “condensed and polished into the terse version that became the most familiar of American quotations.”

An impressive amount of research has gone into Keyes’s engrossing book. It’s a handy reference volume, with its entries arranged alphabetically by key words, but also a delight just to dip into randomly or to read straight through. The book’s many “sidebars” (I put that in quotes since these are boxed and highlighted sections of the text, some running several pages) focus on individuals (among them Twain, Yogi Berra, Benjamin Franklin) and topics (e.g., movie lines, Vietnam, civil rights). Detailed notes on sources, many of them found on the Internet, a bibliography, and indexes of key words and names make this a very useful resource for anyone interested in learning who actually said what.

Keyes navigated some tricky terrain in researching this book. As he points out in his excellent introduction, even reliable sources can err, and it’s likely that quotations “everyone knows” are misquotations. Each discussion ends with a pithy “verdict.” Anyone who loves words will love this book.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail, and other euphemisms

Ever ponder how much we rely on euphemisms? I didn’t, until I dipped into “Euphemania,” a new book sure to delight language lovers.

The book, by Ralph Keyes, explores how we use euphemisms as stand-ins for words that evoke fear, unease or embarrassment.

And, best of all, it offers hundreds of examples, from antiquity to the present.

Did you know, for instance, that “penis” was a euphemism in Cicero’s time? It’s Latin for tail.

But “penis” is what Keyes calls a “fallen euphemism.” “They start out as euphemisms, they’re supposed to be respectable, and then they take on the taint of what they refer to.”

“Disease” is another fallen euphemism. Think “dis-ease” and you see that it was once a gentle term for illness.

As you might guess, body parts and sex are the most popular subjects for euphemisms. In this group, “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” is a favorite. Meaning “having an affair,” it was born in 2009, after one of former S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford’s staffers offered it as an explanation for the missing governor’s whereabouts.

Keyes likes it, too. “Thank God for Mark Sanford,” he says.

In recent years, Keyes has noticed, money and finance have birthed many a euphemism. Saying someone is “highly leveraged” sounds nicer than saying he’s in debt up to his ears. And a “market correction” seems less scary than a 300-point drop in the stock market. …

- Pam Kelley

http://www.app.com/article/20110116/ENT/101160318/FI RST-READ

APP.com

Some euphemisms are so old we don’t even recognize them as another era’s attempt to avoid dangerous words. One example: “Body wax,” Keyes notes, was once a euphemism for what waste managers today euphemistically call “biosolids.” (Time travelers planning a makeover in the past, beware.)

Other bygone euphemisms have undergone another sort of evolution: They have themselves become naughty enough to preclude their appearing in a newspaper.

What’s a well-meaning interlocutor to do? As Keyes points out, leaning on other languages helps.

“Modern sex educators use as many Latin terms as possible to avoid embarrassment when discussing body parts,” he writes. “In an account popular in England some decades ago, a British soldier who had been shot in the buttocks during World War I was asked by a woman visiting his hospital ward where he was wounded. The soldier responded, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t say. I never studied Latin.”

The shelf life for euphemisms is sometimes brief. For a period in the 19th century, Keyes writes, Britons referred to bedbugs as Norfolk-Howards. (New York hotels have undoubtedly produced their own bedbug euphemisms by now.)

And five years from now, “hiking the Appalachian Trail” — a phrase used by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to conceal an adulterous affair — is unlikely to provoke many snickers, much less guffaws.

Other euphemisms — darn, heck, gee, gosh — prove more enduring.

As Keyes points out, while euphemisms may be our constant companion, the subjects we use them to skirt around change over time. From a preoccupation with piety (our ancestors didn’t want to anger the gods with the wrong words), the West shifted in the 18th century to an obsession with social propriety.

This obsession peaked in the Victorian era, and we’re still feeling its effects, as Keyes demonstrates in chapters entitled “Speaking of Sex,” “Anatomy Class” and “Secretions and Excretions.” (Did I mention how few examples can appear in a newspaper?)

Today, we’re adding our own brand of euphemisms to the list, Keyes writes. Think “economic downturn” for the Great Recession and “collateral damage” for civilians killed inadvertently in war.

“Euphemania” is a great book for people who love linguistic and historical trivia. (For them, it’s probably better than spending an afternoon in bed with bonbons, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. At least, I think I’m not.) But it’s also an insightful look at how societies use language to elude taboo subjects.

The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that we must pass over in silence the things we cannot speak about. Maybe a euphemistic bon mot would do in a pinch, though.

- Doug Childers

Who knew that sea slag would be retro! This new book explores popular terms such as “cut and run” which evolved from the habit of sailor who needed to leave the harbor so quickly, they would cut the lines and run, and many others.

By Jann Malone

Read a reference book from cover to cover?

That sounds like something only someone with nothing better to read would do.

But I bet if you pick up a copy of Ralph Keyes’ “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When” (387 pages, St. Martin’s Griffin, $15.95), you’ll get sucked into it, too.

What fun to discover that baseball’s Yogi Berra isn’t responsible for some of the best quotes attributed to him. Even he knew it: “I really didn’t say everything I said.”

Like what? “It’s déj? vu all over again” is an unlikely Berraism, Keyes says, as is “Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours.”

And, sadly, the research trail also shows that Yogi didn’t say “It ain’t over till it’s over,” though I think what he did say is almost as good: “We’re not out till we’re out.”

And if you’re thinking what Yogi actually said was “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” he didn’t. Washington Bullets coach Dick Motta did during the 1978 NBA playoffs.

But he’s not the original source. He credits Dan Cook, a San Antonio sportscaster, but Keyes traces its origin back to a widely-repeated Southern saying.

How does this kind of misattribution happen? “The reference we’re most likely to consult,” Keyes writes, “is our memory.”

There’s more to it, though: Keyes says people want quotes to come from the people they want them to come from, and they also want them to be better than they actually are.

That’s how Winston Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat” became “blood, sweat and tears.”

Keyes calls this kind of pruning and improving “bumper-stickering.”

In a quote that matches the best in his book, Keyes says: “Memory may be a terrible librarian, but it’s a great editor.”

Here’s more about that Churchill quote: Keyes says “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” left a long literary trail before Churchill used it in 1940.

How does Keyes know all this? Research.

The Internet is both a blessing and a curse, he says. Online tools — digital books and newspaper databases — help, but many Web sites contain unverified information.

He even finds errors in “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” and “The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations” and suspects readers will find some in his book, too.

Since he spends a lot of time warning us about accepting quote attributions without checking back to the original sources, it’s comforting to find about 75 pages of his own source notes at the back of the book.

The rest of the book is organized alphabetically by key words, which works just fine, as long as your key words match the author’s. When they don’t, there are three indexes that help: key words, names and sidebars.

Most of the sidebars belong to the most frequently quoted — or misquoted — people: Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Ann Landers and the like.

I’d like to give you quotes from them, but I can’t. I hear the fat lady singing.

The kind of writing Keyes does requires a great deal of research. Go down into the basement of his house, as I did a few years ago and you will find rows of four drawer filing cabinets stacked double high. It is from these files that he gets the ideas for his books. He gathers and stores newspaper and magazine articles and other bits of information, often his own jottings, as he comes upon them and stashes them away for possible later use. While searching his files for a work in progress, he may very well come upon the seed of an idea for his next book or article. These days, he may just be his own best resource.

And that brings me back to my original point: Keyes is more than a writer; he has fashioned himself into an expert on the origins of expressions used in everyday American speech and as a resource for us all. I Love It When You Talk Retro is a resource work, complete with notes, bibliography and an index, that can be breezed through with the ease of reading a personal essay or a work of fiction. What he has discovered is that the origins of our everyday speech can be a source of amusement, and he readily shares the amusing tidbits he has uncovered with his readers.

“After chasing down their origins I found myself repeatedly musing, ‘So that’s where that comes from!’ Keyes writes.

In I Love It When You Talk Retro Keyes posits that expressions that enrich our language such as “bigger than a breadbox,” “show me the money” and “cut and run,” while seeming to have achieved universal meaning over time, may not really be understood by those of generations that follow the one that spawned them, or by those for whom English is a second language. He calls these words and phrases retrotalk.

“To qualify as a retroterm,” he writes, “a word or phrase must be in current use yet have an origin that isn’t current.”

Catch phrase references like “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” “Where’s the beef?” and “cha-ching” of TV commercial fame already a generation old, are not likely to be understood by today’s teens. Neither are references to scratched or broken records likely to conjure up meaningful images to young people who download their music from computers directly to their I-pods. This is the kind of stuff that is fodder for Keyes who tirelessly back-tracks to the point of origin, because some of those we think we know, we do not. The term “wimp,” for instance comes from the Popeye comic strip; a “lame duck” was an eighteenth-century stock trader who didn’t pay his debts; to get “caught in a wringer” refers to a feature of an old fashioned washing machine.

“They are verbal fossils, ones that outlive the organism that made their impression in the first place,” Keyes writes. “This could be a person, a product, a past bestseller, an old radio or TV show, an athletic contest, a comic strip, an acronym, or an advertisement long forgotten.”

“Close, but no cigar!” “not worth a tinker’s damn,” “kick over the traces,” you think you know them? You might want to look them up in I Love It When You Talk Retro. Or you might just want to go from cover to cover. It’s more than just an interesting read; it’s a journey into the past.

- Virgil Hervey

Once upon a time, there was a body part we couldn’t mention. Instead, we used words such as dagger, lance, stake and sword. There were other make-nice substitutes (which we also can’t print here), but it all comes down to our trying to make the unmentionable mentionable. Even when it’s done with a wink or a leer. It’s the world of euphemisms, and this is a fairly interesting thought poem on the subject.

Thought poem?

Another euphemism, natch.

- Anne Berdheim

So why in the world would wildlife officials actually kill any of the detestable, projectile-vomiting, double-crested cormorants violating the Lake Erie islands when they could “effectively manage the flock” to get the same result?

And who among us wouldn’t rather slurp down a few Rocky Mountain “oysters” than knowingly consume even one deep-fried lamb testicle?

And wouldn’t most of us happily admit to getting a little snookered, a bit tipsy or even three sheets to the wind — while it’s always the other people who just get flat-out drunk?

Such is the utility and comfort of the euphemism, explains Yellow Springs, Ohio, author Ralph Keyes, a logophile fit for the task of explaining “Euphemania — Our Love Affair With Euphemisms.”

They are, he argues, a barometer of what makes us uneasy. So starving Europeans who ate cats during World War II referred to them as country rabbits.

This small book is fun, and illuminating. It uncovers the why behind our linguistic disguises — the explanation for Churchill’s referring to lies as “terminological inexactitudes” and squid becoming “calamari.”

Keyes starts playfully: His ancestor, one Robert Keyes, “had to spend an hour in the Cambridge, Massachusetts stocks because he had engaged in unseemly behavior with Goody Newell of Lynn.”

That euphemistic accusation, mild to modern ears, leads us to other delicate — and deliciously descriptive — words for acts of even greater unseemliness. Keyes includes an excerpt from the chapter “Speaking About Sex” on his website.

Sex has long been a fertile arena for the safer, or sometimes just plain sexier, synonym. Grandma and Grandpa’s “hoochie coochie” or “roll in the hay” isn’t all that different from today’s “donating DNA” or “horizontal aerobics.”

Even further back, we find “shag,” a word beloved by Mike Myers, first appeared in 1785 in a volume called “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.”

Keyes, best known for writing “Is There Life After High School?,” makes no attempt to codify. Others have tried: Pauline Kiernan’s 2007 “Filthy Shakespeare” tracked the Bard’s multiple references to sex, and the hilarious online drunktionary.com scours up more than 5,000 words used to describe inebriation.

Keyes prefers to edify: “Since language is in constant flux, as are social values, euphemisms can quickly lose their utility. Good words become bad words become good words again, in endless succession.”

Some do have staying power. “Sleep with” and “pass away” have been constants for centuries.

But why is this? Why can’t we just say the word? Keyes points out that “no one who hits his thumb with a hammer exclaims ‘Intercourse!’ or ‘Excrement!’ ”

Quentin Crisp once called euphemisms “unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne,” but Keyes emphasizes they can also be fun. So, too, is his book.

- Michael Scott

The new book I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech by Ralph Keyes about slang sounds (and looks) great. You can read an interview with Keyes here. One fun nugget from the interview:

I was surprised to find out that there were no “secret decoder rings.”

There were secret decoder pins, but no rings.

5 Stars

Paul Kocak (Syracuse)

I was so impressed with a newspaper feature on Ralph Keyes’s The Quote Verifier that I ordered the book right away. I was not disappointed. There are few books I have ever encountered that are more thoroughly researched — and so entertaining. The book is either a conversation starter (or spoiler, depending on your audience). Keyes delights in debunking commonly held assumptions about famous quotes, but there’s no malice. Just meticulous and entertaining research. He points out the evolution of quotations (often much like the children’s game of Telephone). I love how this wonderful reference is organized: alphabetically according to key words, interspersed with special sections on those who are frequently quoted, and a “verdict” at the end of each entry to help the reader reach a decision on a quote’s origin or evolution). Thus, a special section on Yogi Berra tracks down a bunch of alleged “Yogi-isms.” You might be surprised. I was. Gems abound a nearly every page. And the research is cited in a way that makes it fun to learn the origin of a phrase (or the lack of such knowledge). An example is the famous phrase “Iron Curtain.” It is commonly known that Winston Churchill used that phrase in a 1946 sppech about Soviet influence. But Keyes exhaustively points out a whole bunch of similar uses that occurred much earlier. Then he gives a verdict: “Many authors, one key publicist — Winston Churchill.” I loved reading the blurb on the phrase “fifteen minutes of fame” (is it Andy Warhol’s? Hey, I don’t want to give away the juicy tidbits) and on the phrase “May you live in interesting times” (is it really of Chineses origin?). And so many others. Keyes’s book has delighted me so much I recently found it a worthy companion on a long trip. I recommend this book to teachers and professors (even just to educate students in acquiring a healthy skepticism), news reporters and editors, talk show hosts, and anyone interested in history or good conversation. It should be on every library shelf, both public and private.

Our everyday speech is filled with arcane references we don’t even know we’re making, terms Ralph Keyes calls verbal fossils.  Examples include “cooties” (a term for body lice that afflicted First World War soldiers while fighting in the trenches), “reading between the lines” (derived from people writing secret messages in invisible ink between the lines of a letter in precryptographical times) and “old fogey” (originally referred to the payment received by 18th century soldiers who did extended time in the army). The number of phrases derived from a single puppet show is particularly noteworthy. The classic British entertainment Punch and Judy showcased a stick-wielding husband who would beat down anyone who stood in his way. Keyes writes, “Because so much of its action derived from Punch’s slapping one and all with his stick, the term slapstick became synonymous with broad physical comedy. Pleased as Punch refers to anyone who seems happy with his own actions.”

In his time prolific American writer Ralph Keyes has tackled a whole range of non-fiction topics, from the lingering effects of life at high school to the importance of one’s height (or lack thereof). Keyes has a particular fascination with the vagaries of language, and his latest book dissects our everyday use of euphemisms. It’s a subject chockfull of comic potential, but [his book] manages to balance the humour with a keen analytical approach as to how and why we feel the need to express ourselves so obliquely so often.

Did you always feel confident that there was a full book to be written on this subject?

The more I delved into this the more I wondered whether I could limit myself to a single book on the subject! It’s such a rich topic, not just as it relates to language but to class, gender, sex, even food.  Research has found that we’re more likely to eat offal, say, which sounds awfully close to “awful,” if it’s called variety meats. On the American frontier fried calves’ testicles were called Rocky Mountain Oysters, dried beans Alaska strawberries. In just one recent episode of Mad Men, “lubricate,” “fortify” and “unwind” were used euphemistically for “consume copious amounts of alcohol.”

Are euphemisms a failing of our use of language, or a celebration of it?

Yes, and yes. Euphemisms too often are a way to avoid facing a subject squarely, or even honestly. At the same time euphemisms can be wonderfully creative. Friendship with benefits, for example, or the thousands of euphemisms we’ve conjured for menstruation such as Aunt Flo’s come or rebooting the ovarian operating system. Some of the best euphemisms grow spontaneously out of current events: “Wardrobe malfunction,” “close your eyes and think of England.”

You identify the different motives behind our use of euphemisms – privacy, creativity, code and so forth. Do you think the balance between these motives is shifting at present?

Ever since euphemisms became part of our conversation many centuries ago, we’ve relied on them as a tool of discretion, coded talk and fanciful word play – as Shakespeare realized better than anyone. Some motivations for using euphemisms have clearly declined. Calling bears honey eaters or the brown ones for fear of summoning them by using their real name, for example, no longer feels necessary. At the same time, we’re more likely than our ancestors were to euphemize death (pushing up daisies, taking a dirt nap) and to give euphemistic names to money matters (subprime loans, illiquid assets, etc.).

Has writing this book made you more self-conscious about your own use of euphemisms?

Well, that is a cheeky question! The answer is: yes. I have definitely become more conscious of my own use of euphemisms. I’m no less inclined than most people to use the usual euphemisms for sex, sex organs and body functions. Who would have me to dinner if I didn’t? Certainly my wife and I have more fun than before playing around with euphemisms in conversation.

So you have your own private euphemisms?

Oh yes.  For example, because a previous book of mine on the topic of dishonesty was called The Post-Truth Era, we now call the slightest deviation from absolute honesty “being post-truthful.” Because our teenage son once concluded that during road trips we called stretches of incredibly boring landscapes “scenic,” we now use scenic as our secret euphemism for “boring.” Most couples and families develop their own in-house euphemisms. So do co-workers. Mastery of office euphemisms is an essential vocational skill these days.

- Andy Murray

As long as we have had language we have had the need not to say what we have to say. No culture and no period in history have been exempt from euphemisms, least of all our own. Don’t even try to avoid them. You can’t. Every important aspect of life — sex, food, bodily functions, war and death — has developed its own subset of empty phrases that have become common parlance. The power of popular linguistic historian Ralph Keyes’s new book Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms is that, while tracing the amusing histories of our softest expressions, he also shows the invidious, stultifying power of the doublespeak we impose on ourselves out of a misguided, phony niceness.

“Hiking the Appalachian Trail” is perhaps the latest widely accepted euphemism, a phrase that derives from Congressman Mark Sanford’s claim that he was on a West Virginian nature trip with his sons when he was actually in Argentina with his mistress. Euphemisms often emerge from such amusing, vivid anecdotes. In the London of the 1970s, “discussing Uganda” became an acceptable term for intercourse after one (mercifully unnamed) couple, who had obviously been having sex at a party, claimed they had been discussing African politics instead. Sex once provided the most fertile ground for the development of euphemisms. For the act of masturbation alone, we have “self-abuse” or “the solitary vice” or “pocket pool” or, for those in the military, “blanket drill.” As the sexual revolution changed our morality, it changed our need for such elusive terms. The word “bastard,” which once had to become “illegitimate child” or “love child” in polite society, doesn’t need a euphemism anymore.

In place of sexual euphemisms, we are developing an elaborate system of political euphemism that threatens to sweep public discourse into a contentless spew of inoffensive nonsense. Once, the politically motivated abuse of language was strictly the preserve of the left wing. Political correctness demanded that “problems” become “issues,” that failure become “deferred success.” But during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, he led a grand right-wing game of catch-up with the left, stripping language of its danger and force and connection to truth more than political correctness ever could. War became “regime change.” Catastrophic market losses became “increased volatility.” Torture became “the application of pressure.”

The great mercy of this sordid linguistic history is that no euphemism works for very long. Keyes calls the process by which euphemisms lose their capacity to evade meaning, “the euphemism carousel,” itself a pretty term for the nasty phenomenon by which the softness of an expression disappears with each usage. The word “penis” is itself a euphemism from Latin; it originally meant “small tail.” In our own time, the euphemism carousel revolves at an increasingly rapid rate. The word “retarded” began as a euphemism. In my lifetime, it has been overturned for “developmentally delayed,” which means exactly the same thing, then “learning disabled,” then “differently abled.” In a sense “differently abled” is the ultimate euphemism because it describes every single member of the human race, lacking any capacity for distinction. None of this “verbal kabuki,” as Keyes describes it, matters anyway, because kids in the playground just start shouting “differently abled” instead of “retarded” when the official language changes. “Euphemizing represents a forlorn hope that renaming something might change its essence,” Keyes writes. Change words as often as you like, kids are still going to find a way to be nasty.

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, explained our tendency to euphemism as an expression of human selfishness: It gives us “the profit of saying and the profit of denying what is said.” The slipperiness of euphemisms explains their attraction to politicians, who hate making enemies among potential voters. The tendency to be inoffensive in language can have unfortunate consequences, however, both personally and politically. A recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, “Who you calling obese, Doc?” debated the merits of adding “medically” in front of “obese” in an attempt to soften the stigma of the word: “Though lapsing into euphemism can soften a bleak diagnosis, it can also lead to confusion. Euphemism is no friend of precision. Thus doctors are sometimes faced with a dilemma: Should I be sensitive or accurate?” Even in the most crucial decisions of our life, we avoid direct language.

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote. Euphemania, while proving Eliot’s statement, also offers an appealing countertruth. The cowardice of euphemism is always defeated in the end. Everyone with a brain eventually works out what is being said. And then the codes become more amusing than confounding. An obituary of an English aristocrat once noted that the deceased lord was “an uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man.” Everybody knew that meant he was a public flasher. You just needed to know the code.

- Stephen Marche

5 Stars

Patrick O’Connor, writer and book lover (Glendale CA)

The Quote Verifier is entirely magnificent. Who can resist this book? I can’t stop reading it. It’s like eating peanuts: once you start you can’t stop.

Patrick O’Connor is the author of Don’t Look Back

Gen X’ers with iPod buds stuck into their ears might puzzle over the meaning of terms derived from phonograph records: “flip side,” “like a broken record” and “in the groove.” Ralph Keyes is here to help with “I Love It When You Talk Retro” (St.

Martin’s, $25.95), which describes the origins of terms based on the technology, politics or culture of days gone by.

I never knew, for instance, that “doofus” is derived from “Dufus,” a dimwitted character in the Popeye comic strip, or that the first “truth squad” was a group of Republicans who followed President Harry Truman as he campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

- Rob Kyff

Got a new book: I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2009). Interesting terms on Page 3:

Retrotalk — allusions to past phenomena. Retroterms – verbal artifacts/verbal fossils that “hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset.” (In the groove, flip-side, like a broken record: referring to vinyl records.) Retronyms — terms needing a modifier to distinguish them from new versions (snail mail/e-mail, acoustic guitar/electric).

an excerpt by Ralph Keyes

Euphemisms are an accurate barometer of changing attitudes.  Verbal evasions put a spotlight on what most concerns human beings at any given time.  This is as true today as it was when the Victorians considered legs too titillating to be mentioned by name.  (Limbs was the preferred synonym.)  Things concern us that didn’t concern them, however.  An explosion of topics has become eligible for euphemistic discourse: not just the usual suspects of sex, body parts, and bodily secretions but disability, death, and anything that has to do with money.

When the editors of a collection of personal essays about money had trouble recruiting contributors, they approached a man who’d already written about his drug addiction and nervous breakdown. Surely this author would have no difficulty writing about money. He did. The writer begged off, confessing that there was no way he could discuss the subject candidly.

He is not alone. Money is one of our most taboo topics. I know many more people who will tell me about their sex lives, their loneliness, or their fear of dying than will reveal how much they earn, own, and owe. Therapists commonly find that nothing is harder for patients to talk about than money. In a survey of women’s attitudes, Ms. magazine discovered that those polled considered money “the ultimate intimacy,” more difficult to deal with openly than sex.

Perhaps one of the best indications of a good book is that it seems as if it ended far too soon. Euphemania is bursting with fascinating examples of the rise and fall of the acceptability of various words and phrases in the English language, each of which reflect the mores of the time.

Consider the sanitation of words incorporating the word “cock”—originally a rooster. As another more sexual meaning usurped that meaning, long innocent words suddenly sounded lewd “such that ‘cockroaches’ became ‘roaches.’ ‘Haycocks’ became ‘haystacks;’ and ‘apricocks,’ ‘apricots.’” And the author of Little Women was known as “Louisa May Alcott” and not, “Louisa May Alcox,” which is just one of the many ways her family spelled their name initially. “Alcox” itself was changed from “Alcocke” which was changed from “Alcock.”

Keyes also notes the strange trajectory of words that were once utilized as a polite form of an impolite word, but then became, themselves, impolite and vice versa. Consider words such as “retarded,” which was once a more polite way of saying, “idiot,” and is now considered worse. Conversely, consider the words “dork” and “jerk,” which were once synonyms for penis but have lost that connotation, although they live on in such sayings as “jerk off” for masturbation.

The author does not remain in dusty annals, but instead glides artfully between examples that run the gamut from Pliney the Elder (“fizzle” as flatulence without noise, what we might gently call a “silent but deadly”) to World War II (“Department of Defense” replacing “Department of War”) to the TV show “How I Met Your Mother” (“reading a magazine” as a euphemism for “in the bathroom pooping”).

Interestingly, Keyes ends his book where others would have started, with a chapter entitled, “Why we Euphemize.” He gives reasons under titles like Comfort, Privacy, Creativity, and Class. Keynes reasons that, at their worst, euphemisms can be manipulative. Still, “when used judiciously, euphemisms can civilize discourse and be a welcome form of courtesy in rude times. Does anyone want to routinely take part in conversation larded with ‘shits’ and ‘fucks,’ let alone listen to them?”

Arguably not.

- Logan Lo

5 stars

L. Longfellow

I could not have imagined a reference book that reads like a novel. Fortunately, Ralph Keyes could. An exceptional accomplishment.

Layne Longfellow, Ph.D., Longfellow Reads Longfellow

I Love It When You Talk Retro (St. Martin’s) by Ralph Keyes explains the origins of colorful phrases for which younger people may have no cultural context, like saying someone sounds like a broken record or an object is bigger than a breadbox.

Retro Speak:

The Houston Chronicle ran a short interview with Ralph Keyes last week. He’s the author of the book I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, which looks at the origins of some well-known clichés and turns of phrase.

Keyes says many popular catchphrases come from old TV ads, movies and comic books, such as “ka-ching” from an ’80s Rally’s hamburger ad that starred Seth Green, and “98-pound weakling” from comic book ads that sold Charles Atlas exercise programs.

He believes people hold onto favorite phrases and expressions as a form of generational pride and generational arrogance. Keyes says Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd use “retro talk” to exclude the younger people in their audience and wink at those in their generation.

The author also says that many old terms come from boxing because it came with a tradition of good sports writing, while other sports, such as football, do not share the same literary tradition.

And what lies ahead? Keyes says “going rogue” will most likely be big, as are the terms “reboot”, “reset” and hitting the “reset button”.

My dictionary defines “euphemism” as: “the substitution of a mild or indirect expression for one thought to be offensive or blunt.” We all employ euphemisms, some of us more than others. They can soften verbal blows. They can help us to circle around unpleasant topics.

Ralph Keyes has taken our enduring cultural affection for employing euphemistic expressions and made it into a book that is by turns, amusing, informative and even slightly vulgar. “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms” is a veritable smorgasbord of words that we might summon if our intent is to try to be inoffensive.

Keyes zeroes in on some conversational subjects that can make us uncomfortable: sex, our bodies, our bodily functions, medical conditions, death, food, money and war. As Keyes takes us through these somewhat touchy subjects we realize why they can inspire euphemisms and why a number of them are rarely included in family newspapers.

Fortunately, there are quite a few I can mention in this review. Keyes observes that talking about money can make some people feel a bit nervous. That’s because some of us don’t have quite as much of it as we might wish to have. Keyes notices that some individuals will euphemistically describe their condition as “financially insecure” or “a little short.”

His section on euphemisms for food is rather illuminating. Nobody wanted to eat Patagonian toothfish until they renamed it “Chilean sea bass.” A fish called “slime head” was another slow mover until they started calling it “orange roughy.” Have you ever eaten “dolphin fish?” Perhaps you did after they began calling it “mahi mahi.”

Death is another topic that we often choose to circumnavigate. Keyes states that “when it comes to death, the euphemistic fog becomes nearly impenetrable. The dead are ‘no longer with us.’ They ‘left the building.’ ‘Kicked the bucket.’ ‘Bought the farm.’ They’ve ‘gone home,’ or ‘south,’ or ‘west,’ or to ‘the last roundup.’ They’ve ‘laid down their burden.’ They’re ‘pushing up daisies.’ ”

Then there’s war, a subject so unpleasant that we might actually consider not having any more if we were forced to discuss them without resorting to euphemistic language. Keyes recounts how “civilians killed by mistake in Vietnam were sometimes referred to as ‘regrettable by-products.’ ”

Every day we coin euphemisms. Keyes sees positives and negatives in that. He reasons: “On the one hand, they can be a source of evasion. A way to avoid topics that should be confronted, of choosing not to face unpleasant truths. At worst, euphemisms are employed by politicians, bureaucrats, merchants and others, as tools of manipulation. On the other hand, when used judiciously, euphemisms can civilize discourse and be a welcome form of courtesy in rude times.”

“Euphemania” careens through hundreds of euphemisms with rambunctious zeal. Keyes lives in Yellow Springs. He has been honing his writing craft for decades. This book, his sixteenth, could become a classic.

- Vick Mickunas

4 stars

Phillip G. Knightley

This book does exactly what the title says it does. All those quotes you use from time to time and never know the source are now a thing of the past. I wrote a book once called “The First Casualty”, taken from the quote “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” I looked it up in this book and there it all was–who said it, where and when and an assessment of the value to place on each attribution. The book is worth every penny you pay for it.

As for gung-ho, Ralph Keyes points out in his new I Love It When You Talk Retro that it was the motto of a New Zealand group, taken from the Chinese words kung and ho – work and together. A colonel in the South Pacific adopted it for his Marine battalion, and a 1943 movie made that battalion’s story popular – and also the phrase. “Over the years,” Keyes writes, “gung-ho took on an odor of overzealousness. Nowadays, calling someone ‘real gung-ho’ isn’t necessarily a compliment.”

Times change, meanings too. Keyes’ book is full of phrases, most still in use, whose origins are not what we might think, and some really take the cake – a phrase originally used after the Civil War by freed slaves to refer to the cake they’d give the winner of a dance competition that mocked the marches in plantation balls.

- Howard Shapiro

I painted this study of negative space after reading a review of Ralph Keyes lastest book, I Love It When You Talk Retro, Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech. Mr. Keyes’ previous book was the inspiration for a previous post of mine on quotes and mis-qoutes. So many sayings and expressions that we use today can be traced back to the far reaches of history. Illustrated here is “Eating Crow”. We all know what it means, but where did it come from? Most likely, it came from a mid 19th century joke that went like this: If you get stuck out in the wilderness do these 3 things; 1. catch a crow 2. boil the crow for a week with one of your boots 3. eat the boot. That might sound like a Henny Youngman joke, but I don’t think he went that far back! Another story has a British and American soldier from the War of 1812 forcing each other to eat a crow that the American shot. Frankly, it makes no sense to me and smacks of urban legend. Better check out Snopes.com for that one!

Harry Truman stopped the buck at his desk, but how did we start “passing the buck” to begin with? Keyes offers up an explanation featuring gambling out on the frontier. A buck knife was passed around to mark the dealer of each hand. If the cards dealt were questionable, the dealer used the knife to defend himself. If you didn’t care to take a chance on getting sliced up like deli turkey, you would chose not to deal and thus, “pass the buck (knife)”.

Speaking of turkey, let’s talk….Evidently, “talking turkey” derived from an old saw that had an Indian and a White Man hunting together. At the end of each trip they divided up the game and the Indian always ended up with all the crows (and, presumably, was “eating crow”), while the white dude claimed all the turkeys. That is, until our Indian got fed up and finally started to “talk turkey” with Mr. PaleFace.

Ok, so before you go off half cocked, let me give you some scuttlebutt. This isn’t the most scholarly history you will read, but if you are curious about the origin of American slang, I’m afraid it’s hobson’s choice for you. If you have trouble making small talk at cocktail parties a book like this might just be right up your alley. Alright, alright. I’ll stop now. Enjoy!

Author Ralph Keyes is intrigued by how we say certain things without quite saying them. In Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, he explores subjects that have inspired creative phrasing, from sex and money to food and death. Whether it’s because we are afraid to blaspheme, want to be polite or (like Shakespeare and Mae West) just like to have fun with language, there’s no shortage of motives for employing euphemisms. Keyes spoke with TIME about how disease became a mainstream word, what processing meat means, and why it is that we go to the john.

Is it possible to speak without using euphemisms?
I would hate to try. Who would have me to dinner if I just let it all fly, linguistically speaking? It would be very, very difficult to speak without euphemisms.

So why write about them?
The euphemisms we choose to use tell us something about our values, and they tell us about what makes us uncomfortable. I define euphemisms as what I call comfort words — they’re words we use in place of words that make us uncomfortable.

That includes all kinds of slang.
It includes slang, it includes jargon. But what makes us uncomfortable changes with time. Our ancient ancestors were so worried about bears, they didn’t even want to name them because they feared [the bears] might overhear and come after them. So they came up with this word — this is up in Northern Europe — bruin, meaning “the brown one” as a euphemism, and then bruin segued into bear. We know the euphemism, but we don’t know what word it replaced, so bear is the oldest-known euphemism.

So many of our mainstream words began as euphemisms. Cemetery was originally a euphemism for graveyard: it’s Greek for dormitory or the sleeping place. Dis-ease became a polite way to say someone was sick: he’s suffering a little dis-ease. Now it’s become a mainstream word, a synonym for sick. That happens a lot. But then in another, opposite process, euphemisms take perfectly good words and taint them. There was a time when occupy was a synonym for having sex, and so for a long time, occupy became a very risqué word. Now it’s been rehabilitated. But we see the same process at work with hook up.

Are we using more euphemisms now than we used to?
In certain areas. We use less in the areas of sex and body parts, and body functions. Certainly in religion, who cares if you say God or Jesus Christ, or hell or damn? On the other hand, in the areas of food, death, war, disability, ethnic sensitivities, we’re much more inclined to be euphemistic than our ancestors were. We’re much more cautious about using words for killing animals than we used to be. We don’t kill them anymore; we depopulate herds, or hunters harvest animals. Housewives used to bring in a chicken and chop its head off and pluck it and disembowel it and clean it up. Well, they weren’t processing it, they were butchering it. In war, we don’t drop bombs, we drop force packages. [Those who use these] incredible amounts of jargon try to deflect us — and maybe even themselves — about what they’re doing.

And you see this as one danger of euphemizing.
Oh, yeah, because it keeps us from having to face what we’re up to. David Lloyd George — he was Prime Minister of Britain during World War I — once said that if we ever spoke plainly and clearly about what was going on on the battlefields, the public would demand that we bring an end to war. Soldiers almost never kill, on the battlefield, they wax an enemy soldier, they off him, they ice him, they grease him, they neutralize him, they liquidate him, they light him up, they render him inoperative — that’s one of my favorites.

Do you have an absolute favorite euphemism?
I love European lifestyle for sleeping around. I love at peace with the floor for being drunk. I like go offline for die. A high-school classmate wrote me that somebody he knew used to work for a life-insurance company and when it came time to pay benefits on a policy, they would say the policy holder was postretirement. Some of them are very creative. In the whole field of what we’d call bathrooms, the words change: I love where the Queen goes alone. We call them johns, that is because in the 18th century, people used to say they were “going to see Cousin John.” In the early 19th century, when John Quincy Adams was in the White House, he was the first one to install an indoor toilet. So then people would start saying, “I’m going off to visit Quincy.”

You have a whole section on “fallen names,” from John to Charlie, even your own name, Ralph.

Well, as a Ralph, I’m very sensitive to this issue. I mean, God, it’s not just vomit, but all sorts of undignified ways my name gets used. Johns are even worse off. In this country, a john, of course, is a bathroom; in Britain, johnnies are condoms.

You note that in Victorian times, fear of blasphemy gave way to fear of impropriety. What spurred that on?
I think it was primarily that the middle class was growing, and people really wanted to be seen as proper. You no longer said leg, you said limb. You didn’t ask for the breast of a chicken, you asked for some white meat.

Which recalls that supposed anecdote about Churchill.
Wherein Winston Churchill was asked what kind of meat he would like at a dinner party, and he said “I would like some breast, please.” A woman said to him, “We don’t talk that way here.” He said, “But what would you call it?” And she said, “White meat.” So the next day he sent her a corsage with a card saying, “Pin this on your white meat.”

- Alexandra Silver

I have been having a lot of fun reading Ralph Keyes’s latest book Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.  He’s a smart guy and he’s written a lot of smart books – this is his fifteenth book – and this is another one.

Keyes opens his fascinating book with a story of two elderly bachelor brothers who’ve agreed to take in a pregnant high school student.

They show her around this old farmhouse.  At the threshold of a small    room, one says, “Here”s where you step out.”  The girl looks puzzled.

“You know,” explains the man.  “The commode.  The indoor outhouse.  Well, what do you call it?”

“That’ll do fine,” says a teacher accompanying the girl.

“That’s what she always called it,” continues the man, referring to his mother.  “I’m just trying to be proper.  I’m just trying to get us started off on the right chalk.”

“Aren’t we all?” Keyes writes, letting us know this elderly bachelor brother “was struggling with the age-old challenge of finding respectable euphemisms for dubious terms.”

And what is a euphemism?

“Words or phrases substituted for one that makes us uneasy,” Keyes says.  They are, he writes, “Technically … a form of synonym.  But they have far heavier freight to carry. That freight is what Euphemania is about.”

And for us word lovers, he lets us know right away where the word comes from: “Eupheme,” he writes, “was the nurse of ancient Greece’s Muses. Her name means ‘good speaking’ (eu = ‘good,’ pheme = ‘speaking.)”  And good speaking is what this book, Ralph Keyes’s wonderful new book Euphemania, is all about.

First off, I like all the history it gives, a lot in the opening chapter in which he speaks broadly about his subject, how euphemisms are created and why – which, he says, “usually involves reducing the temperature of overheated terms” – and a lot more peppered throughout the rest of the book.  There’s a bit of history, and it’s great fun, in each and every chapter.

It’s a short book, only 248 pages, eleven chapters, and I liked them all, but I especially liked chapter three, “Speaking of Sex,” where Keyes covers everything from masturbation to promiscuity, from “Doing it” to “Sex Talk.”

Then there is the lovely chapter on “Secretions and Excretions” (chapter five) in which he tells us “there’s an intimate relationship between disgust and euphemizing.”  “Anything that nauseates us, disgusts us, revolts us,” he says, “we’re going to euphemize.”  In this one there’s a section on “Windbreaks” which, being a bit scatological myself, I found quite interesting and delightful – but, and here’s one of the great things the book does, it not only delights, it can teach you something as well: “Because euphemisms for gas emitted from the rectum are more universal than most,” Keyes writes, “they have provided a useful tool for tracing the evolution of language.” Apparently someone broke wind as early as 1552 and I am happy to know that.

The section in this chapter called “The Smallest Room” also fascinated me.  To read about the history of our struggle to find a way to talk about what we today call “the bathroom” – itself a euphemism – was pretty darned interesting and a lot of fun, too.

And this is the way of the book.  In each of the chapters Keyes takes us into another area of human functioning where euphemisms have and had their day.  He takes us into the world of doctors and medicine, for example, where his short and informative discussion of consumption and what it really is was great.  There, too, the tiny bit of history on the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, which killed 40 million people worldwide, was wonderful.  The discussion of menstruation and all its euphemisms was interesting.  How initials abound in the medical field, how BO became such a prominent term, how complex and fascinating “medspeak” is and can be – all fascinating.

Do you know about Rocky Mountain oysters?  Do you know what it means to be “three sheets to the wind?”  What “a little pick me up” is.  “A wee drop”?  Ever had “one too many” and awakened the next morning feeling a bit “under the weather”?  Did you know money was one of our most taboo topics?  A subject many of us feel is the most private thing we can ever talk about?  Want to tell me how much do you make?

I was particularly interested in his discussion of how euphemisms played a large role in the financial crisis that began in 2007, that we’re still in.  Keyes makes it clear how words, phrases, and language that evades, hides, obfuscates, all these financial euphemisms, served the nefarious ones responsible for perhaps the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression.  He is convincing in his claim that euphemisms serve the predatory merchant, the cynical ad exec.  “We pay a price,” he says, getting a bit political – and my only regret is that he didn’t do more of this, didn’t get more political more often – “We pay a price for the increasing manipulation of language on behalf of commerce.”  He makes it clear we’re being tricked and duped, confused and bamboozled.

In politics, too, we pay a price: we don’t lie, we “misspeak.”  We don’t lie, we “exercise poor judgment.”  Bernie Madoff, who stole billions of dollars from his customers, those who trusted him to invest their money, apologized, Keyes writes, for his “error in judgment.”  His error in judgment?!

One of my favorite sections of the book was in chapter ten, “Brave New Worlds,” where Keyes spoke of how established politicians manipulate language to achieve their ends.  How “euphemisms have become an integral part of political and social agendas. Politicians of every stripe compete to portray their positions in the most benign language available … Words matter … As political figures like to say,  ‘Name it and frame it.’”

Keyes ends his book asking why do we do it – for comfort, he says, for consolation, he says, for privacy, too – and then finishes us off with this:

It is well established that humans have a gene called FOXP2 that allows us to speak.  We also know that different parts of our brains manage speech differently.  Those who lose their ability to use complex language after suffering damage to the parts of the brain that control conscious thought processes often retain an ability to curse that’s rooted in the most primitive limbic region of their brains.  Some linguists believe that swearing is only a distant cousin to speaking per se, more an ejaculation than a serious attempt to communicate. That could explain why the capacity to use bad words often outlives the loss of an ability to use good ones.  Following a stroke, say, some patients who are incapable of saying, “How are you?” can still exclaim, “Damn!”

Evasive speech apparently originates in the newer parts of our brain where complex thought originates.   While words that we utter spontaneously when provoked are more likely to emerge from the uncensored limbic brain, given an opportunity to ruminate we turn to the cortex and choose from among its vast archive of euphemisms. Since the brain and a capacity to speak have evolved jointly, it may even be that creating euphemisms contributed to our ability to think.

Euphemistic words for topics such as bears and flatulence are among our oldest and most universal.  Medical researcher Valerie Curtis thinks that a need for euphemisms to refer to body secretions and other toxic effluvia could be one of the earliest linguistic imperatives felt by human beings.  The same thing might be true of euphemisms for sexual activity, a topic that is typically taboo because of its potential for disrupting the social order (among other things).

One might even argue that the need to come up with euphemisms for  terms considered taboo is our most ancient source of verbal creativity.

And Ralph Keyes wonderful new book, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, just might convince you he’s right.

- Jimmy Chesire

Winston Churchill once said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” But the shrewd political leader took little care to avoid plain speaking in other circumstance. Once at a dinner party in Virginia before World War II, he called, breast of chicken, well, “breast of chicken”. An American woman sitting next to him took umbrage and suggested he rephrase the term to “white meat”. The next day, the woman received a corsage with the message, “Pin this on your white meat.”

Churchill must have taken delight in his little act of nonconformity, but his off-colour joke is unlikely to go down well with society’s eternal love for euphemisms. Or “unmentionables”, which is also the title of American author Ralph Keyes’ latest — and sixteenth — book.

Keyes defines euphemisms as “words or phrases substituted for ones that make us uneasy” but have been evolved, suitably exploited and rendered defunct once they lost their “euphemistic status”. So, what makes this book different from the scores of others that have nothing more than an inventory of genteel vocabulary on offer? Unmentionables (titled Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms in the US) does more than just itemise euphemisms. Each chapter is replete with a set of taboo words, accompanied by the background against which they emerged. The anecdotal reminders about how euphemisms are a handiwork of the oversensitivities of different eras affirm the book’s theme: “Euphemisms are an accurate barometer of changing attitudes”.

Unease has always beset certain topics of discussion, and every era has a favourite. In Keyes’ words, “Euphemisms have gone from being a tool of the church to a form of gentility to an instrument of commercial, political and postmodern doublespeak.” So, if you were a primitive being, you would call a bear “grandfather” and a lion “the lord from the underworld”; early humans believed using the actual word for ominous entities like predators and evil spirits might invite trouble. In a later era, when fear of god and devil reigned supreme, Jesus Christ became “grease us twice”, Hell sought refuge in “hen” and if you didn’t follow these rules you would be “jim-jammed”, not damned.

With time, profanity lost its lustre as a subject of spiritual concern. Keyes observes that in the prelude to the Victorian Age, “fear of blasphemy gradually gave way to fear of impropriety”. Seeking cover behind euphemisms to avoid any allusion to “Victorian’s secrets” or simply, sex, body parts and secretions, became the norm. Should you sneeze, you would apologise for a “nose spasm”. And it wasn’t your leg that you hurt; it was your “limb”. Brides in Britain would have to “close their eyes and think of England”, if they were to engage in dutiful sex. And using “where the Queen goes alone” for, um, a toilet sums it all up.

Yet, it’s with a certain effort that you skim through three segments of extensive bawdy discourse and crud. Isn’t it about time Keyes’ cut to modern-day euphemisms? He does the needful. The portions dealing with death, medical terminology, money and war would strike a chord with readers, since today it’s with some concern that we refer to these subjects. In the unsentimental Middle Ages, there was little need for coining evasive terms for death; unlike today, when “casket” has replaced “coffin” and it’s the “funeral director” you look for, not an “undertaker”.

But hiding behind deceitful words to obscure the cruelty of war, terror acts and aggressive interrogation techniques is barely a revelation. Nor are warfare euphemisms exclusive to the West; Keyes chooses to stay within familiar territories of wars with Vietnam, Korea and Iraq. And the novelty of money matters and workplace jargon has long worn off. It is here that the book becomes a hasty compilation with little attempt to explain the subtext.

If you appreciated Keyes’ love for detailing in the chapter “Anatomy Class”, too much articulation in the section on “comestibles”, or edibles, will have you nauseous. He leaves little to the imagination when he talks about tails, intestines, feet, lungs and kidneys of beings that move, crawl and fly. These delicacies are simply termed “variety meats” by restaurant owners to reduce the shock value. However, what are we to make of renaming Chinese gooseberries “kiwi fruit” so that they sell better? That’s rebranding, not euphemising. This is included in the section on “the power of positive euphemising”, which is a bit removed from the tenor of the book.

Keyes confuses matters when he approves the use of slangs in a hip way to avoid referring to an embarrassing topic directly. How does replacing the word killing with “whacking” improve things? And the censorship technique of using asterisks hardly qualifies for euphemising.

However, Keyes has done well to introduce those who were brave enough to call a spade a spade. Take peg-legged Bill Veeck who insisted that he was crippled and not “disabled”. And Union general Tecumesh Sherman minced no words when it came to mentioning war. “The glory of war is all moonshine,” he once remarked.

Unmentionables is engaging as long as it keeps to euphemisms. The moment Keyes ventures into vague slang, jargon and self-bestowed sobriquet, the book loses sight of its selling point: to be more than and different from a collection of uneasy terms. Nonetheless, read it and you would probably find yourself secretly looking for possible dodges even in frank discourse, or devising some of your own.

– Shivam Saini /  March 30, 2011

5 stars

Beckman Communications “book doctor” (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Two years ago, my co-workers made fun of me because I tried to use the word “eponymous” in a news release. They deleted it, saying that no one knows what that word means anymore. One of the many things I like about Ralph Keyes is that he uses words like “eponymous” — and he expects that you’ll know what it means, too. Keyes’ writing will either teach you some really cool words to use at cocktail parties — or make you wish that you had paid more attention during your 8th-grade vocabulary class.

With Quote Verifier (QV), Keyes has added more fodder to the quote mill, which he kicked off with his Nice Guys Finish Seventh. QV can be read from beginning to end, or it can be read non-linearly as a reference.

Who originally came up with “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”? Kennedy? Which one? Neither, actually. You’ll find this under the alphabetical listings under ASK, where you’ll find that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said something remarkably similar 80 years before JFK did. There’s an entire section (under the “Ks”) devoted to the Kennedys, especially John and Robert. Having grown up in Massachusetts, I was often treated to “Kennedyisms.” John Kennedy usually cited his sources. Bobby often cited John and Ted credited Bobby.

Also, as a former and unreformed New Englander, I was ecstatic to see that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was correctly credited for his “Serenity Prayer,” as opposed to “anonymous,” which I so often see. (Niebuhr’s widow lived up the street from me and was the speaker at my high school graduation.) However, “Shays’ Rebellion” was spelled “Shay’s Rebellion,” a mistake commonly made in the Midwest. Daniel Shays hasn’t been quoted for saying anything remarkable, or I’m sure Keyes would have gotten his name right.

The book is organized in a very user-friendly manner. The key words in each quote are in all caps and the quotes are listed alphabetically according to the key words. An index in the back directs you to the people who said — or didn’t — what you’re trying to find. Also in the back is a key word index directing you to the quote.

If you sit down and read this book linearly as I did, a few things are bound to happen:

1) You’ll hear people cited for things all over the place for things they didn’t think up first. Coincidentally, I was reading the section about an army traveling on its stomach when someone made reference to it on television (attributing it incorrectly to Napoleon, as most people do according to Keyes).

2) You’ll be afraid to quote anyone for fear of getting it wrong.

3) You’ll wonder how long Keyes worked on digging up each quote’s source. His sources range from Celestial Seasonings tea boxes and Reader’s Digest (which I am going to take with a grain of salt now) to university libraries and tottering biographers of celebrities of centuries past. If someone ever found the ancient libraries of Alexandria, Keyes would be the first in line to check out who really said that an army travels on its stomach. It’s kind of scary.

I wouldn’t want this to be a library book that I had to return. I would want it on hand, where I could refer to it frequently and react with my notes in the margins. This book would be a good purchase for people who like to use quotes (in speeches, newsletters, classes) and want to be correct. It would make a great reference for any student or writer, as well as anyone who wants to know more about the history of our favorite expressions.

From pink slips to red tape, from asking “Where’s the beef?” to looking a gift horse in the mouth, American English has thousands of interesting colloquialisms. Benchmarks are still vital today, but who remembers that they were once small metal markers placed in the ground by surveyors?

Ralph Keyes does. The author of three books about writing, Keyes takes on the slang of the past century and beyond in his fascinating if overnamed book, “I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech.”

“Today’s 18-year-old may not know who Mrs. Robinson is, the size of a breadbox or why ‘going postal’ refers to a major uproar,” says the back-cover blurb. Fair enough. But the book is anything but archaic. There’s plenty of relatively recent pop culture—from “You talkin’ to me?” to “I’ll have what she’s having.”

We live in a world of euphemism. Are you ill, or just a little under the weather? Are you an oldie, or a pensioner, or a senior citizen?

Are you unemployed, or between jobs, or (like a couple of friends of mine) currently freelancing as a consultant?

Everywhere we go, everything we do, we find language moderated and smoothed over to spare someone’s blushes. Euphemism represents ‘a flight to comfort’, says U.S. word-hound Ralph Keyes.

It ‘softens the harsh, smoothes the rough, makes what’s negative sound positive.’ Politicians are fluent in it. As a father of small children, I’m not bad at it either.

There have, of course, been books on this subject before: I have one or two on my shelves. But Keyes is interested not just in the euphemisms, but in what they say about the people who use them.

Euphemisms, he believes, are an uncannily accurate barometer of changing attitudes. A history of euphemisms is therefore nothing less than a history of us. Centuries ago, for instance, when religion ruled, even to say the word ‘God’ was to take the Lord’s name in vain. So people said ‘blimey’ instead of ‘God blind me’, or ‘Gadzooks!’ instead of ‘God’s hooks’. In the U.S., people still say ‘darn’ or ‘dang’ instead of ‘damn’, and ‘gee’ instead of Jesus.

The ancient Greek root word for euphemism actually meant the opposite of blasphemy. If you can’t say something nice, best not to say anything at all.

Sex, though, has been the most fertile territory for euphemists down the ages. In the Decameron, in 1353, Boccaccio used ‘put the devil into hell’ as a metaphor for the sexual act. In Victorian England, young women would ‘shut their eyes and think of England’.

It’s remarkable how many terms start out as euphemisms and then become themselves offensive. ‘Whore’ was once a euphemism for some forgotten word; by the 16th century, it was being replaced in translations of the bible by ‘harlot’, which itself was being blue-pencilled by the 18th century. In the Philippines, prostitutes call themselves guest relations officers. Teenage girls in hong Kong paid to go on ‘dates’ with older men call it ‘compensated dating’.

The early 19th century was what H.L. Mencken called a ‘golden age of euphemism’. You couldn’t say ‘leg’ in the U.S. for fear of causing offence: ‘nether limb’ was the preferred term. Chicken legs became ‘drumsticks’, while trousers, presumably guilty by association, became ‘inexpressibles’ or ‘unmentionables’ – hence the book’s title.

In the Pickwick Papers, a servant named Trotter ‘gave four distinct slaps on the pocket of his mulberry indescribable’. Woe betide you if you even thought of mentioning ‘pants’.

Most famously, American polite society got into a terrible tangle with the traditional word for a male chicken – cock. Words such as ‘cocksure’ and ‘cock-eyed’ couldn’t be used when ladies were present. Haycocks were renamed haystacks; apricocks became apricots. Louisa M. Alcott’s father actually changed their name from Alcocke.

These are just a smattering of the delights to be had from this entertaining, informative and fantastically rude little book.

-  Marcus Berkmann

Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)

Unmentionables starts to wear a little thin after the first few chapters (the book is primarily a trivia-trove), but I liked its recurring motif that certain words come to be perceived as “good” or “bad” as their associations change over time. Steven Pinker and other experts on language have written about how (for instance) the word “nigger” was once used benevolently – including by progressive-minded people who campaigned for equal rights – but eventually became taboo because of its widespread pejorative use by bigots. Many of its “politically correct” replacements have become similarly corrupted through association with prejudiced attitudes. In a world entirely free of discrimination, censorship of this sort would be unnecessary – but then, reading and writing would be drabber processes too. As it is, it’s fun to speculate that many of the words we today regard as being innocuous will have sinister connotations in a few decades.

– Jabberwock, February 25, 2011

By Rob Kyff

Gen X’ers with iPod buds stuck into their ears might puzzle over the meaning of terms derived from phonograph records: “flip side,” “like a broken record” and “in the groove.” Ralph Keyes is here to help with “I Love It When You Talk Retro” (St. Martin’s, $25.95), which describes the origins of terms based on the technology, politics or culture of days gone by.

I never knew, for instance, that “doofus” is derived from “Dufus,” a dimwitted character in the Popeye comic strip, or that the first “truth squad” was a group of Republicans who followed President Harry Truman as he campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

4 Stars

Todd Hagopian “CEO of the Hagopian Institute  (Michigan)

If you are a quote enthusiast who loves to know the history behind the quotes, this is a very good book for you. I am a purist, and just enjoy reading great quotes and having a source to attribute them to, so the extra information got in the way of my enjoyment a bit. I definitely think that people who enjoy the background information will love this book. If that’s you, enjoy!

Todd Hagopian is the author of the popular “Quote Junkie” book series and the brand new “Idiom Junkie” series

April 19, 2010

Buzz up! What a find at my local Library. I am one of those goofy people who simply love to use retro phrases and enjoy discovering where they come from.

I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, is the perfect book to read for someone like me. Not only does he cover many different retro phrases, but also explains where they originally came from.

The language is easy to understand, and some of them will have you chuckle. Who can’t use a good laugh?

For example, do you know where the phrase – scrape the bottom of the barrel – originates from?

On Page 133 in “I love it when you talk retro!” he explains it as such:

Direct quote : On the eve of the Civil War, pork was second only to wheat as Americans’ most popular foodstuff. Southerners were especially partial to this meat: freshly slaugthered or as salt park, fatback, cracklings, chitterlings (chitlins), pickled pig’s feet, headcheese, bacon, or ham. Such delectables were liable to be served three times a day. Noting the many form in which Americans ate the flesh of hogs (large pigs), an antebellum doctor in Georgia thought our country should change its name to the Great Hog-Eating Confederacy, or perhaps the Republic of Porkdom.

Pork was typically stored in a barrel. The fuller the barrel, the richer its owner. Poor folks sometimes had to scrape the bottom of the barrel.  End Quote.

He continues on explaining about other Pork related terminologies like “bringing home the bacon”, “barrel politics”, “lard it up” and more.

Do you know where “cut the mustard” comes from?

How about “dark horse”?

271 Pages full of delightful and interesting Notes and information await you in the wonderful book! For word lovers and phrase crazies like me, this book is a great find.

I would rate it an easy 5 Star and think it would make a great present for most. You may want to see if you can find it at your local library or order your copy here:

Talk retro to me May 9, 2009

This one is for the Young People, if any such lurk among my readers. Are you mystified by the peculiar turns of speech when Baby Boomers talk? Do you feel ashamed that at your unfamiliarity with the TV series of the late 1950s and early 1960s? Are you disinclined to watch hours of TV Land to catch up?

Help is available.

Ralph Keyes has published a book, I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech (St. Martin’s Press, 310 pages, $25.95), that will help you caulk the gaps in your cultural education.

I was particularly touched to find his entries on newspaper lingo, particularly piquant now in the twilight of print journalism.

Deadline, for example, the appointed time by which copy is due or an edition is to be completed, derives from the line in a prison that an inmate could not cross without being shot. (I would very much have liked to recover the original penalty in the newsroom, but I could never persuade my betters even to issue sidearms to the copy editors.)

The spindle on which stories written on copy paper were impaled when editors decided not to run them was called a spike, and to this day a story that is killed is said to have been spiked.

Theodore Roosevelt, alluding in 1906 to “The Man with the Muck Rake” in Pilgrim’s Progress, said that journalists exposing scandals were “raking the muck,” and muckraking has been a badge of honor in investigative journalism ever since.

Let Mr. Keyes help you. With a perusal of his book and a little practice, you could contrive to sound almost as antique as I do.

Euphemisms aren’t going anywhere. We still use them for war, weight, and vaginas. The euphemism-word ratio in romance novels is too much trouble to calculate. But euphemisms change with society; old euphemisms are now everyday words (spend) and once-ordinary words (intercourse) are now uncomfortable letter arrangements.

Author Ralph Keyes wrote Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms, the latest book on the polite way putting things. I scoured through an excerpt for some new meanings on old words.

* Eligibility: Now a word we commonly use for single, eligibility used to reference a man’s status and wealth.

* Intercourse: Originally, “intercourse” referred to any kind of interaction between people. Like, “I saw Adam at the store today and we had intercourse.”

* Occupy: Once a risqué word, occupy was a synonym for sex, but has since become innocuous. Keyes points out that “hook up” is currently undergoing the same rehabilitation.

* Spend: Ejaculate. This is amusing because ejaculate is such a clinical word — who uses it besides doctors and researchers? At the same time, I can imagine a 19th-century doctor asking a woman if her husband spent himself when having trouble conceiving.

* Insulted, Outraged, Forced attentions: Rape. It’s sad, because these words play the act down, but I do like this story Keyes explains it with. In 1878 a woman “told a military hearing that she was ‘insulted’ several times” by her captors and it was “outrageous treatment.” Then the officer asked, “‘Am I to understand that they outraged you several times at night?’ she responded ‘Yes, sir.’”

* Unlawful familiarity, criminal conversation, and mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake: Obviously, these are for affairs. “Criminal conversation” was when a husband brought charges to his wife’s younger lover. The trials were so sensational, otherwise self-respecting Britons followed their press like soap operas.

* Think of England: Dutiful sex within marriage during the Victorian period. It was so popular, people thought it came straight from Queen Victoria, but that’s unlikely. If you saw The Young Victoria, you know she was anything but dutiful.

Do you know of any I’m missing?

- Colleen Barrett

Ralph Keyes has done it again. in EUPHEMANIA he has written another “read it in one sitting.” book. I had other things to do — it’s a week before Christmas — but I couldn’t stop reading it. The naughty bits — euphemisms for #1 and #2 — see what I mean — are hilarious.

Robert P. O’Connor (POMPANO BEACH, FL, US)

4.Stars

D. Olinger

This is not the type of book to read straight through, but rather to pick up from time to time and learn the brief history of the most famous quotations in English history. Most often, the myth does not match the fact. But, the history is never dull and Keyes’ words explaining how the quote gained popular notice are often fascinating.

BOOKS I FINISHED – MARCH 2010

This was another totally random selection off an endcap at the library. I read it in little snippets over the month. Loved it! I’ll probably buy a copy for our family, as I think it’s an excellent way to chalk up some time for English and History credit.

The following books are available at the St. Catharines Public Library.

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO: Hoochie coochie, double whammy, drop a dime, and the forgotten origins of American speech,by Ralph Keyes

What a hoot! Who would have thought a book on slang and speech patterns could deliver the goods. This is the real deal.

- Dina

It’s unusual to call a non-fiction book a “page turner.” Yet Ralph Keyes’ EUPHEMANIA fits the bill. Once I started reading his exploration into the many facets of euphemisms, I was enthralled. Keyes has struck a rich vein with the subject of his latest book. Euphemisms reveal a great deal about a time and culture by the very subjects they seek to disguise. In clear, straightforward prose that contrasts the intentionally vague nature of euphemisms, Keyes lifts the veil on our ever-changing hang-ups with sex, death, money, religion and bodily functions. Keyes also examines the corrosive side of euphemisms: the dodgy doublespeak of corporations, politicians and the military. Laced with anecdotes, scholarly references and humor, EUPHEMANIA is an enlightening and enjoyable read.

Raul Ramos, author of AMERICA LIBRE and HOUSE DIVIDED  (U.S. Midwest)

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IS A RICH AND COLORFUL thing, full of strange words and unusual phrases.

NANCY STETSON nstetson@floridaweekly.com

“One thing I like about language is the way it reflects our culture, our social history,” says writer Ralph Keyes (his last name rhymes with eyes.) “There’s just endless variation and I think revelation about ourselves in the way we speak, the words we use.”

Mr. Keyes, perhaps best known for his bestseller “Is There Life After High School?” which was made into a Broadway musical, recently released “I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech.” ($25.95, St. Martin’s Press) Retrotalk, or retroterms, he says, are words or phrases that make sense to people of the same era, but may not make sense to younger generations, or to immigrants.

For example, he writes, “Retrotalk is a slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena. Such allusions take the form of retroterms, verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset. They are verbal fossils, ones that outlive the organism that made their impression in the first place. They could be a person, a product, a past bestseller, an old radio or TV show, an athletic contest, a comic strip, an acronym, or an advertisement long forgotten.”

Think of it as looking at the generation gap from a different angle. Each new generation has always formed their own slang and catch-phrases, partially in order to differentiate themselves from their elders.

But the older generation’s phrases and common terms of reference may be equally indecipherable to those younger.

For example, he says that cultural references such as “you sound like a broken record,” “stuck in a groove,” “45 rpm” “flip side” and “B-side” might not make any sense to a generation that uses iPods.

They might not know what “bigger than a breadbox” means, or “98-pound weakling,” what Watergate was, or why you shouldn’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Mr. Keyes’s son Scott was born right after the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster occurred in Ukraine.

And when he was in middle school, he went up to his mother and asked, “Mom, who’s this Cher Noble I keep hearing about?”

“Isn’t that funny?” Mr. Keyes says. “And so understandable.

“I saw a movie once, it might have been ‘Raising Arizona.’ And this young woman goes into a motel, closes the door. And it’s an old motel, and has a rotary phone. She looks at it and scowls, and then she picks up the receiver and starts punching the holes in the dial! It’s like, ‘Come on, why isn’t this working?’

“But think about the terms we still use that are related to actually dialing a rotary phone: dial tone. Dial-up service to get onto the Internet. Dial for dollars. These are all based on an obsolete technology. And that’s the esssence of a retroterm.”

Some old words are applied to new products, he says. For example, dashboard used to refer to an “angled board used to protect buggy users from the muddy backspash of horses’ hooves.” Now we use it for the inside panel of a car behind the steering wheel. And Mac computer users know the term as something that shows mini-applications called widgets.

In his book, Mr. Keyes writes that “new circumstances demand new words, however, and Americans have always been up to the task of supplying them. A recurring question in this book is why some endure as retroterms while others don’t.”

He comes up with a list. Retroterms strike a chord, fill a void, excite strong feeling and are fun to say. “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” didn’t last as long as a catch-phrase, but “Where’s the beef?” did. Orwellian, he says, is more fun to say than Kiplingesque. And words such as “cootie,” “rope-a-dope,” “sizzle” and “bimbo” are just fun to say.

But even those of the same generation might not understand all retroterms. In one humorous story in “I Love It When You Talk Retro,” Mr. Keyes recounts the story of an older woman who saw the word “Ka-ching!” in a headline. She thought the term came from China, so asked all her Asian friends what it meant, not realizing it was the sound an old manual cash register makes.

Mr. Keyes’s favorite phrase is “98- pound weakling.”

“I grew up reading comic books with these Charles Atlas ads, where Max, the 98-pound weakling, got sand kicked in his face,” he says. (After going through the Charles Atlas plan, Max returns to beat up the bully and win the girl.)

“And I like some of these where I had to learn (their origins),” he says. “For example, scuttlebutt was the water barrel where sailors gathered on ships. The barrel was called the butt, and the hole where you got the water out of was called the scuttle. They would share gossip like people did over watercoolers later on. That was fun to learn.”

The book was originally three times the size; Mr. Keyes had to whittle it down to a more manageable length. Still, it’s chock full of stories of how certain words and phrases came to be, words such as gizmo, chop chop, cold turkey, blue stocking, mug shot, cut a rug and nudge nudge, wink wink.

In the B’s alone it refers to Babbitt, Barney Fife, Big Brother, Blanche DuBois, Bonnie and Clyde, the Boston Strangler, Buck Rogers and Buster Brown.

His fascination with retrotalk, Mr. Keyes says, “is the way that the words and phrases which we use are so indicative of our generation, or what time we grew up in. And I think the catchphrases we rely on are just as ingrained as when we’re young as our taste in music, our hairstyle, and the clothes we wear. And that’s what I try to talk about in ‘I Love It When You Talk Retro.’”

4 Stars

Shannon Reynolds “The Husband” (Milford, OH United States)

I love quotes and I never really trust the source. Well, this book exhaustively evaluates who said what. Sometimes the conclusion is almost as unbelievable as the source of the quote.

I like the book very much! There are too many quotes where they cannot definitively conlude who the original author is. They leave it to a kind of “Unresolved” state. I’d almost wish they would attribute it to the most likely source and not to two or three as they sometimes do.

The explanations could have been written more clearly.

Ah, the title says it all!  I Love It When You Talk Retro, by Ralph Keyes, is a wonderful peek into the lost origins of some of America’s most beloved and obscure words and phrases.  Did you know that the word ‘doofus’ came from Popeye the comic strip?  Didn’t think so!  I’d like to think that I have a pretty unique vocabulary but this book proved to me that every one of my quirky phrases has a even quirkier beginning.  I was fascinated with the facts that Mr.Keyes provides and I’m now over flowing with trivia that I’m sure will help me at the next party I attend.  Available in paper back and the fact that it’s a fast read makes I Love It When You Talk Retro not only good for your brain but good for your wallet too.

I know you wanna become a cool cat like me!  Be sure to check out I Love It When You Talk Retro next time you’re in the shop.

- Sydney

Word of the Week: Tabloid

Tabloid: A reduced-format newspaper, generally half the size of a traditional broadsheet paper, that opens like a magazine for easier reading on buses and subway trains. Introduced in the late 19th century in England and the United States, tabloid newspapers quickly became known for their sensational content. Tabloid is often shortened to tab.

So far, so familiar, at least for this lapsed journalist. What I hadn’t known was that tabloid derives from an old trademark for a pharmaceutical brand. Ralph Keyes enlightened me in his recently published book with the excellent title I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech:

At first readers didn’t know what to call this compact type of newspaper. By analogy it resembled a kind of compressed medical pill introduced in 1884 by Burroughs, Wellcome. That pharmaceutical company called its new product line Tabloid. It didn’t take long for this term to be applied to any compressed item, including the vertical-fold newspaper format pioneered by London’s Daily Mail and New York’s Daily News. Because tabloid newspapers tended to emphasize sensational news coverage, their name itself came to signify that style of reporting.

In polite society (we are polite here aren’t we?) there are certain words and terms used to describe bodily functions, sex, etc that we do not like to utter aloud. So what do we do? We could perhaps avoid the subject(s) altogether. But after awhile this could make conversation rather difficult and prevent us from being understood.

Or we could use euphemisms.

While I have heard most of these terms (I did learn some new ones) I had never really thought about how they came into use. To me the most fascinating part was the history behind some of the euphemisms.

This is one of those books you will want to read in a single sitting. If you are a lover of words and the English language you are going to enjoy Euphemania.

- SquirrelQueen

While not providing the definitive list of euphemisms in the English language, Ralph Keyes’ “Euphemania” provides just enough word history and naughtiness to make it entertaining throughout. I had no idea, for instance, that “white meat”, “dark meat” and “drumstick” were food euphemisms to prevent our Victorian ancestors from saying the words breast or thigh. Just the very mention of these charged words was liable to get some overly sensitive soul thinking about other beings — perhaps at the same table! — with the same body parts. And we all know where that leads.

Keyes’s thesis about euphemisms – that they disguise words that a society finds distasteful – was no great surprise. Words about sex, death, excretion, and body parts have always been taboo – at least among polite people – or those wishing to be thought so. But I not considered how others words could also be euphemistic – words about money, for instance, and how much of it anyone makes. Words about ethnic groups; words about the handicapped (crippled? Differently-abled?)). Words about war are an interesting case: who wouldn’t feel good about a supporting a nuclear missile called the “Peace Keeper”? But I had not considered capitalism’s marketing apparatus as a haven for euphemizers. When the ugly and toothy Patagonian Toothfish failed to sell, it was re-christened Chilean Sea Bass, and flew out of the deli cases. In the same way, prunes became dried plums and Chinese gooseberry became kiwifruit. The ability for marketers to manipulate we customers was astounding.

If you are looking for all your favorite euphemisms, you’re likely to be disappointed. Yet, almost by definition, a complete list of euphemisms is an impossibility. Keyes shows plenty of examples of euphemisms that never make it into general circulation. These include those invent by families. Parents invent pet words to talk to their little ones about excretion and body parts. The list includes doody, poopoo, poopy, weenis, bumbum and winkle and on and on. The latest trend in euphemism – toward sterile constructions like “reduction in force” (for firing workers) and biosolids (for manure) – seems to show us moving toward place where dealing with actual living beings is becoming taboo and distasteful.

The gift of “Euphemania” is to show how wide and deep is the human tendency to soften “harsh” words. Euphemisms promise to be with as long there are people hoping for upward mobility, covering for their own embarrassments or wishing to sell you something unpleasant.

Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA)

March 12, 2010

When I first saw this book advertised in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I knew it was something I needed to add to my collection. I work with many ‘senior’ individuals, and they often throw out phrases that I have no clue what they mean. Have you ever been there? Someone will say something, you have no clue what it means, but you would feel stupid if you asked for clarity, so you just act as if you know what’s going on. This book is awesome! It is completely devoted to origins of retroterms, verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset. The author states, “To qualify as a retroterm, a word or phrase must be in current use yet have an origin that isn’t current.” The book consists of 22 chapters of true bliss, ranging from Story Lines, Movie Metaphors and The Future of Retrotalk. I have learned so much from this book and I cannot wait to flaunt my newfound knowledge. The first retroterm that caught my eye was white elephant. I am sure many of my readers have been to holiday parties that have had white elephant exchanges. I have always taken part in them and found them to be very entertaining; however, I never thought about where the term came from. Why a white elephant? Well, according to page 12 of I Love It When You Talk Retro, “By legend, when a king in ancient Siam (not Thailand) wanted to make life difficult for someone, he gave that person an albino elephant. Because Buddha’s spirit was thought to inhabit these rare pachyderms, the recipient could not make it a beast of burden. Nor could he sell this elephant. Instead, its new owner had to feed and house this huge white pet until he went broke. From this heritage grows our modern notion of the white elephant: any possession that’s hard to dispose of, but too valued to dispense with.” Interesting fact I must say so myself. At my last white elephant exchange, I got a bag full of “Our 1st Christmas” ornaments from years back. I guess I would much rather this than a literal elephant. In short, I really enjoyed this book. Ralph Keyes has done a great job answering the question, “Where did that phrase come from?” In addition, key words and phrases are highlighted, making this an easy read. I would highly recommend this book without reservation.

One of the best things after the excitement of Christmas is to enjoy the gifts offered by family and friends.

Once more, my husband managed to give me great gifts. Okay, I tipped him for one of the books he offered me. Only because we both read quite a lot and lose track of what we buy at the bookstore, borrow from the library or order on Amazon.

I heard Ralph Keyes on NPR a few days before winter break as I was waiting in the school pick up lane. Since I’ve always enjoyed how my native French and the American languages use different words or expressions to say the same thing, I listened with interest to Mr. Keyes talk about his new book called Euphemania Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.

I knew I had to add the book to my Christmas wish list. I could only benefit from such a book. More than once, as I was a new comer, American euphemisms make me pédaler dans la choucroute or pedal through sauerkraut as we say in my native France when you are in deep —- how do we say already in American?

Asking for the restroom when we say the toilettes in French was bizarre years ago although I have now a hard time to not say salle de bains or bathroom when I return to my native country.

Of course everybody knows that the French don’t blush when they talk of their bodies and their diverse functions. But my American-born children refer to their stomachs for anything happening between their neck and their thighs. BM, PMS, UTI, IBS and many more abbreviated words belong to my American vocabulary but not to my French culture where a stomach is a stomach and intestines are either the small or the large.

Euphemisms not only evolve from epoch to epoch but vary from culture to culture. After so many years spent in the USA, I have forgotten a few French euphemisms. Am I already having a senior moment as we say in the USA or est-ce que je perds la boule (losing the ball, ball used in this case for head) as we say in France?

- Evelyne Holingue

Ralph Keyes has delved into our human nature here. We use euphemisms to soften our words. To disguise them. To wrap them in pretty distracting language. We say what we mean on occasion but mostly we dissemble. We euphemize. We hide behind words that are seemingly less offensive than what we could say if we didn’t resort to euphemisms.

Fascinating stuff here. Keyes explores the things we get uncomfortable discussing; sex, our bodies, our bodily functions, money. You name it-we have the euphemisms for it. Keyes employs a distinctive punchy style here that will have readers spinning and laughing as he keeps those euphemisms pouring non-stop.

It’s terse. It’s pithy. It’s succulent. Try it, you’ll like it.

Richard Cumming “dick” (the heartland)

I had so much fun reading this book! EUPHEMANIA is unbelievably witty and entertaining. I never really gave much thought about where euphemisms came from and why they started. Ever since I finished reading this book, I’ve noticed how much I use them and it’s astounding! When you’re in the mood to learn something interesting, I recommend this book. It would make a great gift!

Bridget Hopper (KY)

To Ponder. . .

Back in woodshed times, American boys itching for a fight sometimes announced this fact by placing a chip on their shoulder,then daring someone to knock it off. Although fastidious contemporary ears like to think this was a sliver of wood, the chip in question

was more likely to be dried cow dung. Hard as it is to picture any boy putting a piece of excrement on the shoulder of his Abercrombie & Fitch shirt, having a chip on your shoulder still suggests touchy belligerence.

Carnivals and circuses alike featured secondary events off to one side, usually in tents. At these sideshows one might find patent medicine being hawked, or bearded ladies to gawk at, or—most exciting of all—cooch dancers, undulating women in filmy harem outfits whom we acknowledge when using the term hoochie coochie for a wide range of risqué

activity. Although what went on at sideshows was sometimes more exciting than what took place at the main event, today, sideshow suggests an activity of lesser magnitude.

Ralph Keyes writing in …I Love It When You Talk Retro.

To Read. . .

This delightful little compendium is the perfect read for all of us who

tend to say “I remember when” too much. Filled with close to a thou-

sand “retro terms,” this is a handy book to help settle disputes or sim-

ply relieve your curiosity about where “that” term came from.

Don’t be a doofus. Buy this book.I Love It When You Talk Retro:

Hoochie Coochie, Double

Whammy, Drop a Dime and the

Forgotten Origins of American

Speech. Ralph Keyes.

- Robert W. Wendover

From NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week, a great bit on euphemisms — where they come from and why we use them — and the new release by Ralph Keyes, Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms. A euphemism can be more than just a clever saying (“pushing up daisies” for example), it can breathe new life into the unfortunately-named.

“[At] one time, Patagonian toothfish was freely available to anyone because no one wanted to eat it,” Keyes says, “until a very clever entrepreneurial sea importer renamed it Chilean sea bass.”

According to Keyes, the tradition of using euphemisms for food is pretty widespread: thymus glands are known as sweetbreads, and bull testicles are known as Rocky Mountain oysters and prairie oysters. Rapeseed oil was an especially tough sale until someone thought to rename it canola oil.

Current events have also provided ample fodder for euphemisms — think “wardrobe malfunction,” “wide stance” or “hiking the Appalachian trail.”

(Visit NPR for an excerpt from Keyes’ book.)

To me, the best euphemisms are all about speaking in code. A group of my friends and I once had a code word for telling the other person to stop talking about whatever they were talking about, because of any one of a number of reasons — the person they were talking about had just walked up behind them, for example, or they were unknowingly telling a mean story about someone to that person’s stepsister. I’d tell you what the code word was, but then it wouldn’t be very effective anymore, would it?

Any fun euphemisms to share?

Rose: This may be a little TMI, but we used to call “that time of the month” Emily. I have a friend who went to school with a girl she disliked intensely, and she told this girl once, “I’m going to name something I hate after you someday.” Thus, a visit from Emily was introduced. :-)

Toni: I love that story — and I love your friend for having such a creative streak. (And, not at all TMI — I recently had to explain “otr” to my boyfriend.)

A great title for a well researched (check the complete bibliography) and enjoyable book that, anyone who likes language, and the way it evolves will read in a day.

Keyes draws almost all of his examples from the anglo-saxon culture, switching from England to the USA. He mentions a few Spanish words but as a French native, I especially enjoyed the references he makes to my heritage.

From “manger les pissenlits par la racine” or eating dandelions by the root when the French talk of death, to the frequent use of French mouth-watering words in the American cuisine, Keyes show that euphemisms vary from one culture to another.

When I moved from Paris to California with my baby daughter I had a hard time to understand what her new pediatrician meant when he asked me about her BM. French aren’t embarrassed when it comes to body functions and it took me a while to refer to the contents of my baby’s diaper as a BM. After many years in the USA, I also say UTI, PMS and IBS, and have learned that stomach in American covers a much larger territory than the organ used in the human digestive system.

However I still favor the word the French use when they want to wish good luck. In American, its polite version is shoot.

Thank you, Mr. Keyes for a fun, well researched and engaging book.

Evelyne Holingue (California)

June 1, 2009

By J.A. O’Sullivan

The cover says it all: hoochie coochie, double whammy, drop a dime. “I Love It When You Talk Retro,” a new book by Ralph Keyes, explores the history of America’s slang, sayings and street talk. Written crisply and divided into chapters like “Fighting Words, “Movie Metaphors and “Seen in the Funny Papers” Keyes gives the low-down behind the expressions we use, and take for granted, every day.

Each chapter spouts phrases like an overloaded jack-in-the-box, with item bolded so the reader doesn’t miss anything. Take this passage on boxing lingo: “Early boxing matches tended to be rough-and-tumble, knock-down, drag-out affairs that went on until one contestant was knocked unconscious and dragged out of the ring. There were no limits on the types of punches that could be thrown by bare-knuckle prize-fighters (so called because they fought for prizes at fairs and such). These contests were free-for-alls.”

Read straight through, skip around or search the retro-term index at the end of the book to find specific references. A quick flip yields a garden variety of Americana: widgets, red tape, barnstorming, by-the-numbers and black sheep,

You’re bound to know a lot of these gems. You may even know their history. But at 320 pages, you’ll find some interesting trivia and maybe even stumble on your new-old favorite word.

This sounds like one of those really interesting books I would never pick up if not recommended by so redoubtable a source as Biblioklept, with whom I do not agree on everything, but whose wide-ranging and eclectic interests never fail to intrigue–I have found many, many good things to read and see through the blog.

If you are a word freak like me, you are going to love this book. Euphemania explains where we get common turns of phrase like “pushing up daisies” and other obscure references. The book is very entertaining and gives insight to historical references. I really enjoyed reading this one and it would make the perfect gift for that closet wordy in your life.

Mary L. Jacobs (Huntington Beach, CA USA)

It’s Retro – But What Does It Mean?

June 3, 2009

Many of us in the professional sector will today bemoan the deadlines that govern our every move. Whether we’re working in marketing, legal services, PR or even good old journalism, it’s as likely as not that we’re on deadline – and that we’re probably a little stressed in the process of hitting whatever deadline we’ve been given.

But how many of us know where the term “deadline” comes from?

To find out, spare a few minutes – if you can – and consult I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes, an analysis of all kinds of “retroterms” that survive, unexplained, in the English language. The book explains the origin of muckraking, scoop, cut and run and – one for the MPs – show me the money, among a myriad of other terms.

It transpires that a deadline would be delineated in American prisons. “Any prisoner crossing it was liable to be shot”, writes Keyes.

Author Ralph Keyes takes readers on an exploration of euphemisms past and present. How and where did some of our most popular euphemisms originate? Why are some formerly popular euphemisms no longer in use? Why do we use euphemisms and what does that say about our culture? Almost as much a study on social mores as it is a study in clever word play, Euphemania examines in a fun and entertaining way, not only the etymology of euphemisms, but also why our society is so caught up in their usage.

Review

Lately, I’ve realized that I’m something of a language geek particularly in the area of etymology, so the instant I saw Euphemania, I was thoroughly intrigued and knew I wanted to read it. What I got was a fascinating study in euphemisms which intermingled the words and phrases themselves with their origins and social commentary on their use. I learned a lot of new euphemisms with which I was not familiar, as well as where many I already knew came from. The author draws on a wide variety of sources including quotes from famous people, songs and literature. Oddly enough, I’ve never studied Shakespeare (not even in school), so until reading this book, I never realized how incredibly “naughty” the Bard actually was. I was also amazed to discover that the original King James Bible contained many words and phrases which over the years have been sanitized, because they came to be considered vulgar. Since censorship is an area ripe for the use of euphemistic talk, there is some interesting discussion on what words and phrases can and can’t be used in movies, television and other media both now and down through history. Could anyone possibly imagine Rhett Butler’s famous last words in Gone with the Wind being, “I don’t give a hoot” or “My dear, I don’t care?” I know I sure couldn’t. I also found myself nearly ROTFL at a sidebar discussion on automatic censoring in Internet forums.

In addition to the great history of words, I also got a wonderful study on the sociology and psychology behind word usages (two of my favorite scientific areas of interest). The sociology angle explores which words and phrases were acceptable in polite company in various eras and cultures and why that is. It is absolutely fascinating how something can be perfectly acceptable in one country/culture and considered insulting in another or how a particular saying could go from being acceptable to vulgar, and perhaps back to acceptable, depending on the time frame in which it was used. In this vein, there was another hilarious side bar on the conflicting meanings of various euphemisms between America and Britain. The psychology angle discusses how “prettying-up” certain words can fool the brain into thinking they are more appealing, such as how adding French words to the name of a food that would normally be considered icky on a restaurant menu will make it sell better. The author also makes some fabulous points on the use of euphemisms, one being that, when done well, euphemisms can show a marked talent for creativity and they can be a really fun way to communicate, the other being that euphemisms can sometimes be overused to the point that they sap power from the words that they replace.

Euphemania covers a large selection of potentially taboo or at the very least uncomfortable subjects with major chapter topics including sex, anatomy, bodily functions, illness and death, food, money and commerce, and war. This book is chock full of “bad” words and “naughty” phrases which could be offensive to some readers, but when one critically analyzes the subject matter, I’m not sure how a book like this could have been written without them. I personally found the author’s directness to be refreshing. There is also an index and extensive bibliography that looks like it might make for some interesting extended reading on the subject. For me, Euphemania was a fast-paced, humorous, and entertaining look at why we use euphemisms that is definitely going on my keeper shelf for future reference. Ralph Keyes certainly has a way with making a topic that could have been dry into something fun and easy for the average lay-person to understand. I only wish all non-fiction books were so engaging and well-written.

Before I picked up Ralph Keyes’ latest book, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, I admit, my understanding and appreciation of the role and breadth of euphemisms in our society and language was merely skin deep. As someone interested in the intricacies and nuances of language, I wanted to dig deeper. Keyes, an author with a prolific list of titles to his name and who has delved into topics including the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of language, surviving high school and the role of success and failure in our lives, once again delivers a rich exploration of a topic most of us have spent scant time even thinking about.

According to Keyes, “Euphemisms are the verbal equivalent of draping nude statues.” Another way of saying we have spent centuries going to great lengths to find other ways of saying what we mean. Some of the areas that Keyes touches on where euphemisms have provided fertile ground are of course, sex, anatomy, money, death, and war. Keyes contends that euphemisms are a useful barometer of changing values and that there is no better way than to determine what concerns a culture at any given moment than by examining its verbal evasions. For example, when children of unmarried parents were referred to as `bastards’ or `illegitimate children’ it indicated society’s level of discomfort with this issue, while today it would barely be considered worthy of a euphemism.

The book is a fascinating journey all the way from Shakespeare’s ample usage of euphemisms in Elizabethan England to verbal dodges for all manner of bodily excretions and secretions, as one chapter is fittingly named. It was interesting to learn that a culture’s level of discomfort with something has not always traveled a predictable trajectory. As for example, when discussing death. Two hundred years ago human beings spoke much more plainly about death, perhaps because it was all the more common. We have in fact as a culture gone from plain talking to excessive euphemizing when it comes to this subject with phrases such as `passed away’, `gone home’, and `gone to a better place’ being commonly used instead of the more prosaic `died.’

The book wraps up with a look at why we euphemize in the first place. Keyes believes it is part of our innate ability to survive and evolve, and is emblematic of our `verbal creativity.’ “After all, it’s far harder to say what one doesn’t mean than what one does mean. An ability to do so – to create euphemisms and use them effectively – demonstrates a high order of intellectual sophistication.” Apparently, this phenomenon isn’t going anywhere. Don’t miss this wonderful and often hysterical compendium of linguistic legacy. Especially recommended for wordsmiths and writers looking for helpful hints on writing subtext.

Holly Hudson Groves

I Love It When You Talk Retro

Retrotalk and retroterms. These words are used by Ralph Keyes to describe the subject of his 2009 book I Love It When You Talk Retro. The main point of this volume is to give histories of words and phrases, the full meaning of which cannot be grasped unless one understands their origins. Keyes gives example after example, such as Ma Bell as the nickname for the phone company. We still say we answer the phone’s ring, we dial a number, and then hang up when we are finished with the call, even though with modern phones we have actually done none of these things. There’s a section on phrases that have appeared because of their connection to the office environment, such as rubber stamp, red tape, and pink slip. Animals are also a source for language such as a lame duck, a sitting duck, and a dead duck, as well as the goose that laid the golden egg, pecking order, and putting on the dog. For a time of amusement and enlightenment, this one’s a winner.

Book

David D.

Euphemania is just perfect for my family. You can read it straight through or it’s nice to leave it sitting out and pick it up every now and then for a little fun.

This book is great for anyone who loves trivia or has a quirky sense of humor. It fascinates and amuses. I’ve picked up all kinds of fun facts that I know I’ll be throwing into conversations or just laughing to myself as I hear others use the euphemisms that I have the inside scoop on.

‘Unmentionables’ is an analysis of the use of euphenism in our language. The days are long gone when we can use straightforward language to describe everyday events. Instead we must dress our concepts with ever refreshed new clothes so that they are fit for polite society and change those clothes when the original meaning is seen through. But Keyes also brings out the more sinister fact that the use of euphemism is not just about politeness, but also politics. Especially in recent years, military and political euphemising (‘spinning’), has become the normed communication in relation to an intellectually challenged tabloid taught public. This is a wide-ranging and very well organised book whose special strength is the extensive research that underpins it.

Prof. Dave Mearns

To cover our ears when we say what we simply must not say, we constantly coin instead words that are more muted and polite.

Thus underdeveloped countries became developing ones, a little bastard is a lovechild and the stock market collapse is an equity retreat. We are nothing if not politically correct when it comes to our prejudices. Yesterday’s ladies of the night are today’s escorts, frigid women are only pre-orgasmic, liars are in denial, and philanderers have zipper management issues.

There is a constant need to hone our hypocrisy, to overcome our hang-ups, which is where euphemisms, the caped super-words, come to our rescue against those big bad words we never want to utter. Euphemisms, the comfort food of conversation, are the meat in Unmentionables: From Family Jewels To Friendly Fire — What We Say Instead Of What We Mean by Ralph Keyes.

In this treasure trove, he delightfully records a million such phrases, words, slangs and literary usages along with their etymology.

In the merry-go-round of everyday speech, social acceptance governs the existence and eventual death of euphemisms. “We rely on euphemisms to tiptoe around what makes us uneasy… Euphemisms are a function of their times,’ says Keyes. Eupheme, by the way, was the nurse of ancient Greece’s Muses, literally meaning ‘good speaking’.

Euphemisms keep the ‘beep’ out of our daily chat. When in doubt, go Latin: phallus, pudenda, areola, testes, coitus… New happenings spawn new vocab so that keeping up with the times can be a tongue-twister. If Justin Timberlake hadn’t grabbed Janet Jackson on stage, there would be no wardrobe malfunction. Britney Spears, Yana Gupta and others would just be boring old flashers.

Keyes rounds up all the usual suspects in realms of anatomy, sex and medicine, apart from general parlance. Sex is it (let’s do it), do (let me do you), and even be (I want to be with you). Necking, petting, boodling, fooling, romping, rantum-scantum, roger, congress, hump, shag, sleep with, hook up and intercourse are all about ‘the beast with two backs’ in Shakespeare’s Othello. Cherry, interestingly, replaced hymen only to be re-replaced by hymen.

Cancer, the C-word, continues the complication. “Twenty-five centuries ago Hippocrates compared the veins snaking out from tumours to crabs, karkinos in Greek. Its Latin translation was cancer.” A cancer patient was described as “having a touch of the Cs”. Terrible sickness and a lingering illness are other C-euphemisms. A tumour is a lump, a growth or mass.

Money, the M-word, has its own telling currency: moolah, bread, dough, scratch, funds, etc. The ‘broke’ are financially constrained, a little short or have cash flow problems. You have to admit, ‘reduced profitability’ sounds better than ‘loss’!

As Keyes says: “Euphemising represents a forlorn hope that renaming something might change its essence. Negative connotations are not in taboo words themselves, however, but in what they refer to. As a result, euphemisms can only protect our sensibilities for so long.” Which is a euphemism for: more euphemisms are being born even as we speak.

I have a love/hate relationship with expressions and phrases. I use them constantly; hair of the dog, hold your horses, juggernaut and selling like hotcakes. That last expression is actually one of the reasons I also hate certain expressions. When the hell did hotcakes become such a hot seller??

I think my hatred stems from the fact that I don’t really know how they started and what the real meaning is behind most common phrases. Then I found this book.

I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech

The phrase drinking the Kool-Aid is a mystery to young people today, as is 45rpm. Even older folks don’t know the origins of raked over the coals and cut to the chase. Keyes (The QuoteVerifier) uses his skill as a sleuth of sources to track what he calls retrotalk: a slippery slope of puzzling allusions to past phenomena.

He surveys the origins of verbal fossils from commercials (Kodak moment), jurisprudence (Twinkie defense), movies (pod people), cartoons (Caspar Milquetoast) and literature (brave new world). Some pop permutations percolated over decades: Radio’s Take It or Leave It spawned a catch phrase so popular the program was retitled The $64 Question and later returned as TV’s The $64,000 Question. Keyes’s own book Is There Life After High School? became both a Broadway musical and a catch phrase. Some entries are self-evident or have speculative origins, but Keyes’s nonacademic style and probing research make this both an entertaining read and a valuable reference work.

The book is a real humdinger! Damn it. Hang on while I look that up.

posted by Chris Illuminati

In his new book Euphemania, a cultural history of euphemisms, Ralph Keyes takes a frank and often bawdy look at why we use euphemisms in social and political discourse, even when such evasions can degrade communication. “We all rely on euphemisms to tiptoe around what makes us uneasy, and have done so for most of recorded history,” writes Keyes, adding that “Euphemisms are a function of their times.” As such, Euphemania surveys different euphemisms throughout different cultures and times, from ancient Greece to the Roman republic, to Shakespeare’s England and the Victorian era (a treasure trove of euphemisms), to our modern age–which Keyes argues is not nearly as frank and open as we might like to think; indeed, one of his most intriguing arguments points out that modern discourse has simply opened up more topics to euphemism, including medicine, politics, and advertising.

Keyes doesn’t intend his book to be a straightforward history or dictionary of euphemisms; rather, he writes “it’s a consideration of the ways euphemisms enter our conversations and how they reflect their time and place. Euphemizing most often results from an excess of politeness and prudery, but it can also demonstrate creativity and high good humor.” Although Keyes always has a keen eye on the prudish mores of which ever age he’s discussing, he balances this analysis with plenty of humorous examples. His tone is fun and earthy, drawing examples from literature, film, TV, advertising, and political rhetoric. Between discussions of the Bowdlerization of Shakespeare, W.C. Fields’s difficulties with censors, or dialog from The Wire, Keyes also holds forth on the strange etymologies of our words. The root of the word bear (the mammal, not the verb) simply means “brown” or “the brown one” — the word bear is an unexpected euphemism, a refusal to name a lethal wild animal. Such examples can often magnify one’s awareness of how indebted our language is to euphemisms. Even when we reach for one of those Latinate technical words, we’ve really just picked up another culture’s euphemism. Our medical standby penis, for example, comes from the Latin word for “tail.” Vagina was a Roman synonym too–it means “sheath” or “scabbard.”

Euphemania is best when Keyes is riffing on naughty bits like these–or sex, or excretions, or violence, or all those things we’d like to otherwise gloss over. Most readers will likely gravitate to chapters like “Anatomy Class” or “Speaking of Sex.” Although Keyes is never dull (if anything, he’s at times too effervescent), his book is less convincing when discussing why we use euphemisms, simply because, at least to this reader, the answers are so obvious–euphemisms are part of the intrinsic codes of our culture. They make it easier to discuss unpleasant things; they build a sense of shared knowledge; they alleviate anxieties of race, place, and gender. At the same time, the cost of euphemisms–particularly in contemporary political discourse–can be astounding, leading to the evasion or outright denial of dramatic problems. Keyes doesn’t offer a pat solution to this problem, which is really better, if one thinks about it, because after all, wouldn’t an overly simplified, self-satisfied answer be just another dodge, another evasion, another euphemism? Good stuff.

Ralph Keyes is well known in the US for producing books featuring both analyses of social trends, and a knack for writing well and entertainingly about them. This book focuses on euphemisms and how they are used, tracing their development in Europe and North America as a response to changing social pressures resulting from religion (17th and 18th centuries), prudery (19th), and anxieties about death, disability and discrimination in our own times.

Keyes explores the extent and content of euphemism in areas of social activity ranging sex, the body, illness, money, food, and war and its consequences. Most contemporary readers will not need to be reminded of the irony of the euphemistically-named “sub-prime loans”, or, “economic downturns” – but they may think in new ways about “private equity firms” and “reverse engineering” after reading this book.

Some of Keyes’s statements about euphemisms made me think about language more generally. For example, euphemisms “don’t just communicate; they take stands”. And he encourages us to think about their effects on the clarity and the “grown-up” character of our thinking.

In the final chapter, Keyes explores the reasons why we use euphemisms. Among other things, he considers how they lessen our sensitivities and embarrassments around social difference – thus taking us, appropriately, into discussions of “political correctness”.

Some readers may want to approach this book by tracing Keyes’s ideas about the development and importance of euphemism, others will want to dip into it for amusement and ideas over a series of evenings. I found it a very satisfying read in both senses.

Dr. Jeff Evans

Review: I Love It When You Talk Retro  July 2, 2009

Do you know what a Venn diagram is? It’s the kind of diagram with two or more circles, showing overlap between different groups. If you were to draw one with pop culture history books (like Don’t Know Much About History) in one circle and pop culture books about language (something along the lines of The Mother Tongue) in the other, right smack in the middle of the diagram would be I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes.

In this well-researched, well written book, Keyes examines (mostly) common phrases and words with (sometimes) forgotten origins. According to Keyes, retroterms are “verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset… To qualify as a retroterm, a word or phrase must be in current use it yet have an origin that isn’t current.”

I would argue that many of the words he writes about aren’t as mysterious as he makes them out to be – most anyone who took a college lit class is going to know who Lolita is and what that term refers to. But early on in the book, Keyes makes the point that just because a term is familiar to one reader, another may have no idea what it means. For his example, he tells the story of George W. Bush’s White House press secretary, Dana Perino, confessing that she didn’t really know what the Cuban missile crisis referred to. Once I got over my shock that such a presumably well-educated woman wouldn’t know her American political history very well, I took Keyes point, and tried to go with it, so to speak. (Still, I wish Keyes had included an explanation somewhere along the line of how he chose what words to include. I also speculated whether he is holding some back for a sequel.)

For each word or phrase, the author shares the term’s meaning, its origin, and an example of its use. One of the more delightful things about reading this book now, is how recent many of these examples were. The 2008 Democratic primary of Clinton v. Obama is referenced several times, as are recent books and articles. While it does make me curious about how well this book will age, it serves to make I Love It When You Talk Retro an excellent read for this day and age.

While I read this book (which I checked out of my local library – the cover really grabbed me) cover to cover, I think most readers would prefer it as a browsing kind of book. Based on the number of times I found my husband reading it in 5-minute snatches, I think he would agree. The kind of history readers who prefer 900-page volumes on intricate scholarship will probably find this book too elementary, but more casual American history fans, and those with an interest in language, will get a real kick out of I Love It When You Talk Retro.

Posted by Lorin (Arch)

I had so much fun reading this book!  EUPHEMANIA is unbelievably witty and entertaining.  I never really gave much thought about where euphemisms came from and why they started.  Ever since I finished reading this book, I’ve noticed how much I use them and it’s astounding!  When you’re in the mood to learn something interesting, I recommend this book.  It would make a great gift!

- Bridget

I came for a certain book and left with this one. The cover was unattractively Lichensteinian but I didn’t judge. It’s basically a collection of western idiomatic language that dates back to ancient times to the present. Written by Ralph Keyes, who has written 15 books before, “I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO,” has made the book as a tool for talking like a stuck up cool cat or a tool for decoding your stuck up cool cat friends or even your political science professor that says to his class, “You guys know what I’m talking about.” This is a great informative read, it’s not just a dog and pony read but a three ringed circus of a read!!  Dog and pony refers to circus shows that could only afford modest animals(no tigers and elephants).”-Ralph Keyes

Show of hands: how many know why the British used to refer to bedbugs as Norfolk-Howards? Just as I thought. Or why a one-o’clock meant a fart in Australia? You can find out in: Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms, by Ralph Keyes.

Answers:

* In Victorian England, “bug” was a vulgar word, so a certain Mr. Joshua Bug changed his name to Norfolk-Howard. It didn’t quite work out as he expected.

* Until World War II, a cannon was fired every day at 1:00pm from Fort Denison, in Sidney Harbor.

According to Keyes, such “situational euphemisms” are relatively short lived, though he notes that some persist for a while:  everyone who watched Super Bowl XXXVIII understands, wardrobe malfunction.

Other euphemisms are much more persistent, none more so than the words we use to avoid mentioning death:  passing away, kicking the bucket, buying the farm, and pushing up daisies (or as the French say, eating dandelions by the root).  Not all of these euphemisms are funny.  Keyes notes that in the military, an event is usually an occasion where someone died, often by friendly fire.  Unlike our more agrarian ancestors who slaughtered animals, we process or harvest them.

Sexual euphemisms are explored too.  Doing one’s duty originated in Rome, in reference to the responsibility of freed slaves to continue to have sex with their former masters.  Hiking the Appalachian Trail came to mean “having an affair,” thanks to a certain philandering governor.  Think of England, y’all!

Those who enjoy pondering words and their meanings will enjoy this article and interview with Keyes on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/14/132056878/-euphemania-our-passion-for-not-saying-it

Rosi Hollinbeck   Oh, boy! Another book about words and phrases that I’m going to want to read. I LOVE books like this. Thanks for posting this. I hadn’t heard of it, but I will put it on my list.

More information is available on the KPCC website.

I Love It When You Talk Retro   July 14, 2009

Not long ago, I used the expression “sounds like a broken record” regarding a classmate of my 10 yr old. He had been repeating the same issue over and over in class, and that simile seemed accurate. But my daughter, never having seen a record asked what that expression even meant. Hmmm.

I call a business associate and her voice mail greeting suggests that to have the call transferred, I can “dial zero” to get the operator, but to my younger coworkers, who may have never seen a rotary phone, what does ‘dial’ even mean?

Two years or so ago, when the higher definition DVDs were either HD or BlueRay, I remarked that this reminded me of the Beta/VHS war. That sure did separate those of us over 30 or so from those younger.

On the subject of video tape, I bought my first VCR in 1981, so I was used to saying “tape a show” to mean I was recording it. But for the last few years, it’s a DVR (a TiVo digital video recorder) and there is no tape involved.

I can list a great number of these, expressions that came into the language, and some which are slipping away. So when I heard Brooke Gladstone (Host of On The Media) interviewed the author of I Love It When You Talk Retro, Ralph Keys, I knew this was a book I had to pick up.

Retro offers us not only the examples that I mention above, but goes further back in time to offer the origins of a wealth of expression that we use, or often hear, but may not know where or how they came to be. I knew the current use of the expression “Drink the Kool-Aid” (a phrase meaning blind allegiance), but I hadn’t known that the drink in Jonestown wasn’t Kool-Aid, but Flavor Aid, a knockoff beverage. Keyes offers chapter by chapter, retroterms from law enforcement, movies, politics, and many other areas of life. Toward the end of the book, you realize there are so many expressions, that one book just scratches the surface, a comprehensive discussion would take an encyclopedia (uh, wikipedia for you under 30 readers) to organize.

I often find myself offering up a word or phrase origin when the conversation permits. For example, we all know what paparazzi are, but did you know that the term came from the 1960 film La Dolce Vita by Frederico Fellini? In that film appears a news photographer named Paparazzo, and thus the word made it into the language. (This is my own offering here, it did not make its way into the book.) If you have any interest in “the forgotten origins of American speech” this is a book worth reserving at your library.

Joe

“[At] one time, Patagonian toothfish was freely available to anyone because no one wanted to eat it,” Keyes says, “until a very clever entrepreneurial sea importer renamed it Chilean sea bass.”

Current events have also provided ample fodder for euphemisms — think “wardrobe malfunction,” “wide stance” or “hiking the Appalachian trail,” a phrase made famous by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s infamous Argentine escapade.

I Love it When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes, July 14, 2009

I am having a hard time deciding what to call, I Love it When You Talk Retro– it’s American history, its etymology, its social studies, and it is a dictionary!   You can start at the beginning and read right through or you can dip in and out of the pages.    Now you are wondering what is the book about?  It’s about the American language, specifically — “verbal artifacts that hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped into the sunset”, or “a word or phrase that must be in current use yet have an origin that isn’t current.”    To list a few retro terms:  hit the sack; skosh; stump speech; Home James and don’t spare the horses; cut and run; taken aback; start from scratch; pleased as Punch–how many do you know and use and how many do you know where or when they began?  I Love It When You Talk Retro explains the start of these colorful terms.  It is a fun read, I frequently have entertained the people around me when I say “oh that’s why we say that”, and then of course, I read the passage to them.

Author Ralph Keyes explains why some words “strike a chord” and stay with us, while other popular at the time sayings just disappear. Retro talk can be punch lines of jokes, advertising slogans, lines from movies, TV shows and radio and even a person’s name.  It can be a quote from someone famous, mmmm I not famous but I wonder if I can come up with a phrase that will resonate with people and become a part of the American Language–I’ll put “my nose to the grindstone.”  And “that’s all she wrote.”

Posted by Michele @ North Bend

First things first…what IS a euphemism?  What…you didn’t think that I’d just assume everyone knows what that word means, did you?  Pffft!  No way.  It’s one of those oddball words that’s fun to say, hard to spell, and used in conversation rather often but not directly.  (Confused?  You’ll see…)  A ‘euphemism’ is… “the act or an example of substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term for one considered harsh, blunt, or offensive”…by way of The Free Dictionary online definition.  In short, it’s a nice way of saying something that could otherwise be seen as offensive to the general public.  We humans have taken this to a whole other level as we try to be “politically correct” about anything and everything so as not to offend anyone (I say “we humans” because I doubt the animal world takes this sort of detour in their communications….just sayin’).  It’s rather trying at times, wouldn’t you say?  I mean sure, much of it as been ingrained in us since childhood becoming second nature to some degree but haven’t you ever just wanted to say something straight out in lieu of beating around the bush?  (Oh look, there’s an idiom right now…basically a cousin to the euphemism.)

In my opinion, this is one of those books that is best taken in small doses.  It’s not to say that it was not an interesting read….it was.  It satisfies the inner etymologist in each of us as you uncover how words and phrases have changed in both structure and meaning over time….some for the best and others still to be determined.  Really, some of the niceties that have been invented in order for some things to be spoken of in polite company are astounding!  Even some of these newly invented means of conveying the naughty fall victim to the stigma the original word carried.  Not sure what I mean?  Example time!

Let’s see…this choice was actually harder than I thought it might be.  How so?  Well, euphemisms are as we said a nice way of putting into words those less than comfortable situations and conversations and as such the unending parade of commonly heard examples are shall we say more than I wish to put into words right here.  From a tad risque to OMG-you-did-not-just-say-that, there is not shortage to those with shock value.  However, back to my original point….an example.  Let’s take a part of the body…no no no, remember we are in “clean” territory with this example….the stomach.  Once upon a time, it was in fact obscene to call this place of digestion by its name, hence it was referred to as the “belly”, “rotundity”, “paunch”, “tummy”, or simply the “midriff”.  Yes, even this simple area of the body was cause for controversy and alarm over what it should be called so imagine the range of words used for others “things that shall remain nameless”…

In summary, a book for scholars and non scholars alike for you see there is a wealth of information as well as fun to be had within the pages of this particular book.  Don’t believe me?  Are you calling me “truthfully challenged”?  “Misleading” even?  Why I am fully put off by that gregarious assumption…and by my own over use of euphemisms in those last few sentences.  (LOL)

- GMR

Ralph Keyes, author of many books including the new Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, talks about the prevalence of euphemisms in our culture—particularly when talking politics.

‘Pushing Up Daisies’ And Our Passion For Euphemisms

From “passed away” to “Chilean sea bass,” euphemisms are a way to avoid unpleasant terms or phrases.

But in Euphemania, Ralph Keyes argues that using them isn’t necessarily lazy or evasive; it can actually be harder to not say what we mean and still get our point across.

“Euphemisms can be incredibly playful and a lot of fun — very creative,” Keyes tells NPR’s Neal Conan.

Take, for example, the euphemisms we use for death. Keyes notes that the French talk about “eating dandelions by the root,” their version of “pushing up daisies.” He also recalls an old high school classmate who once told him how the life insurance industry avoids the word: “When one of their policy holders became eligible for his benefits to go to his heirs, they said he was ‘post-retirement.’” And one of the author’s favorite modern expressions is “going offline.”

I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes

This book is definitely best when browsed or kept in the bathroom, but as it was I got it from the Leisure section of Parks Library, thus 4 weeks only with no renewals. Quite a fun book, it gives the pop(?) culture origins of all sorts of phrases, both for fun and to help those of us who weren’t quite born when, say, people were keeping meats cooled in the icebox (turns out that’s the equivalent of a refrigerator, not a freezer). Although there is an exhaustive list of word phrases, I often thought of ones that didn’t show up in the index. More frustrating, Keyes often threw out references in the middle of the text that were prime candidates for the book but weren’t actually included.

Again, great book, best if you can enjoy it in small chunks.

Have you ever wondered just why we as people have such a terrible issue with plain speaking? It seems that we are always looking for ways to express ourselves in the unclearest of ways, whether it be with irony, sarcasm or the most beloved euphemism. Ralph Keyes has done the research for us and reported back in his fine book,

Why did Reagan kick the bucket? Was bear really the name of the ferocious animal that scared our forefathers? This and others are explained in the most deft way in this little book.

- j. weaver

Using the Veg-O-Matic while listening to my victrola   July 30th, 2009

My mother had a saying: “That and fifty cents will get you right on the bus.” The meaning was, no matter what, you still have to pay for the bus.

An example: Me: “That woman has beautiful hair.”

My Mother: “Yeah–that and fifty cents will get her right on the bus.”

We all make references depending on the times/places we’re from.  Depending on our differences, this could mean we’re not always understood.  Every year, Beloit College releases its Mindset List, which provides a look at the cultural benchmarks shaping the lives of students entering college that year.  The list reminds us of the ever changing frame of reference of popular culture.

Ralph Keyes acknowledges the confusion and makes entertaining sense of it in: I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech.  Divided into subjects, Keyes takes us back down a familiar, nostalgic road, as he defines “retroterms,” (a word or phrase in current use yet having an origin that isn’t current).  Ever wonder where “bigger than a breadbox?” came from?  Or, what the news anchor meant when she reported the president had “some splainin’ to do?”

This is a book about language but definitely not just for word junkies.  It’s geared to those of us old enough to be somewhat familiar with these terms or who use them without knowing their origin—an example for me would be “She’s got moxie.”  The book can be read cover to cover but makes an enjoyable browse as well.  I liked perusing the “Index of Retroterms” in the back, traveling to corresponding pages when a phrase intrigued me.

I had different levels of knowledge concerning the retroterms.  Even when I knew them, however, it was comforting to delve deeper. Barney Fife?” Easy. “Catch-22?  I’m on it. “Age of Aquarius?” Honey, I was there. Blanche DuBois? Bobby-Soxers? “I’ll Have What She’s Having?” Check, check and check.  On the other hand, why someone would “take the cake?” was news to me.

The book was reassuring as well as enlightening.  It certainly made me feel better.  Seems that simply by hanging around all these years, I’ve gotten smarter.  It’s nice to know I’m really good at something, even if that something is a passing knowledge of outdated terms.

And where will all this accrued knowledge get me?  These days, along with 2 bucks–right on the bus.

- Terry, Central

We tend to read a lot of fiction here at the Brazen Broads Book Bash, so it’s always nice to get our hands on some good nonfiction books almost as a way to cleanse our palettes sometimes.  Ralph Keyes book, Euphemania,  is the perfect mix of informative yet interesting.  In it, he shares the reasons why we use euphemisms so often in our daily speech.

The main idea behind the book is that euphemisms are used to make the uncomfortable more comfortable.  Therefore, they’re very common in discussions about sex.  One anecdote offered in the book refers to Jesse Jackson’s threat during the 2008 election in which he stated he wanted to “cut off Barack Obama’s nuts.”  Keyes explains that the major news organizations struggled with how to report this, using euphemisms such as Jackson wanted to do something to his sensitive areas.  (It escapes the Broads why they couldn’t just say Jackson wanted to castrate him.)

Euphemania is quite enjoyable to read and provides the answer to why some of the common phrases in our language have become so popular.  Often humorous, it’s a fun read for anyone who appreciates the English language.

We post the interesting and kooky things we find while looking for the answers to reference questions.

I was especially tickled by the entry on mattresses in the furniture section of I Love it When You Talk Retro. It seems that before the insides of mattresses were monitored by any sort of law, many new owners would wake up itching. I suppose that this is why the phrase “Don’t let the bedbug bite” first appeared. States started to require that a list of mattress contents be attached to new mattresses. This solved the original problem and opened a whole new can of bedbugs. It seems that the warnings against removing the content labels were so dire that the mattress-buying public was afraid to do so. A whole generation of mattress label hilarity was born.

In his new book Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms2  Ralph Keyes devotes two pages to the language of US workplace firings:

Discharging employees is one of the leading occasions for euphemistic discourse in the workplace. No one is fired, of course, or sacked, though they might be furloughed (or, more likely, placed on indefinite furlough). Discharged employees were part of a staff reduction, a recalibration of personnel, or a redeployment of resources. Alternatively, they might be deaccessioned, decommissioned, dehired, discontinued, outplaced, separated, terminated, unassigned, made redundant, or, in the latest cirumlocution, decruited. Employees at a big bank in New York talk of being escessed. (“Jake got excessed last week due to a re-org.”) Counterparts in a Silicon Valley company worry about being surplussed. The voicemail of a dismissed computer company executive there told callers he’d been uninstalled.

For a discussion of a UK expression describing a voluntary leave of absence (known over here as a “mental health day,” see my 2008 post on duvet day.

Excellent and recommended! I’ll have more to say about Euphemania in a future post.

- Nancy Friedman

Does anyone know the meaning of “ping-pong diplomacy” or the origin of the “Stockholm syndrome”?  In case many of the history lessons from high school have been erased from your hard drive, fear not: you don’t have to go back to school. There are good books for refreshing your memory. Every American that would like to fart every once in a while in an intellectual conversation now can read the wonderful book ‘I love it when you talk retro.’

Europeans with an advanced knowledge of English can also enjoy it. Retro terms are many anticipated words and expressions whose origin is often forgotten. These terms remain in the collective memory but few people know where they came from. They are verbal fossils that sit anchored in (American)-English conversation. For some readers (for whom English is their native language) the author gives perhaps a little too much elementary knowledge.

A handful of examples: pink elephant; Casanova; bimbo; Jack the Ripper, man-bites-dog, tabloid, gonzo journalism, Stepford Wives, Dr. Strangelove, Rambo, Kodak moments, 64000 dollar question (here, the ham question), butterfly effect.

This is no bite-catch-finished book. Nor is it a glance at fashionable words. Much of what’s understood is also known by us. Author Ralph Keyes takes us on an intriguing and enlightening journey through the phenomenon called “retrotalk.”  Recommended for word freaks.

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY JANE BAKER

I love learning where certain words and phrases come from and this book was a pleasure to read.

We all rely on euphemisms to tiptoe around what makes us uneasy, and have done so for most of recorded history.

The word “eupheme” comes from the Greek meaning “good speaking”.

Even Shakespeare used euphemisms in his plays to avoid the sexual references that would offend people. Even food has become euphemisms. For example, if you were in an aisle of the grocery store and were selecting an oil to cook with and the choices were rapeseed oil or canola oil, which one would you select. Most people would pick canola oil because it sounds better than rapeseed, but they are the same thing.

Euphemisms are tools to manipulate or a way to be courteous in rude times. The social value of euphemisms make it possible to discuss touchy subjects while pretending we’re talking about something else.

If you love trivia and knowing the origin of phrases or words, then you’ll enjoy this book.

Happy Reading!

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