Often Quoted but Misremembered Phrases
Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well attributed to Hamlet.
This line is a distortion of the one in Shakespeare's Hamlet, act 5, scene 1, which reads: "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio."
Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new attributed to John Milton.
The saying, often used when embarking on some new venture or taking final leave of friends, is a misquotation of a line by the poet John Milton, with one word altered. In "Lycidas," published in 1638, Milton wrote:
The English are a nation of shopkeepers attributed to Napoleon.
The phrase is commonly attributed to Napoleon as a reflection of his contempt for the English as a nation of petit bourgeois-small businessmen.
Money is the root of all evil attributed to St. Paul.
What St. Paul actually said was: "The love of money is the root of all evil"; he did not mean that money was evil in itself.
Let them eat cake attributed to Marie Antoinette.
In October I789 the poor women of Paris marched on the royal palace of Versailles in an attempt to force Louis XVI to create a new, fairer government. According to tradition, when his Queen, Marie Antoinette, heard the crowd outside and was told they were hungry and had no bread, she said: " Qu'ils mangent de la brioche." This became popularly translated as "Let them eat cake."
The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton attributed to the Duke of Wellington.
When the first Duke of Wellington was a boy at Eton, there were no playing fields and no organized team games, and as one of his descendants remarked, the first duke's career at the school was "short and inglorious." It is therefore highly improbable that he ever said this. It was first attributed to him in print by the French Count Charles de Montalembert in his De I'Avenir Politique de l'Angleterre (England's Political Future),
which was published in 1855, three years after Wellington's death.
Up Guards and at'em attributed to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo.
It is doubtful whether Wellington ever used this phrase. One of his contemporaries, J.W. Croker, reported in i884 that he had written to the duke asking if he really did give this command at the Battle of Waterloo. In an undated letter, the duke replied: "What I must have said and possibly did say was, 'Stand up, Guards,' and then gave the commanding officers the order to attack"-so repulsing the last attack of the French Imperial Guard.
Elementary, my dear Watson! - attributed to Sherlock Holmes.
The very phrase brings to mind Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation, Sherlock Holmes most famous detective of all time. Yet nowhere in any of Conan Doyle's books does Holmes In fact, it ever utter the oft-quoted words, the closest Holmes comes
to saying it is in the story The Crooked Man, published in the Strand Magazine in 1893 and included in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1894. In the story Dr. Watson, Holmes' former assistant, has married and no longer lives at Holmes'
flat at 221B Baker Street, London.
Play it again, Sam attributed to Humphrey Bogart.
Although this is one of the best known catchphrases associated with the tough-guy silent films. screen image of Humphrey Bogart, he never made the remark at all.
Come with me to the Casbah attributed to Charles Boyer.
Charles Boyer built up a screen image that was to talkies what Rudolph Valentino had been to silent films. He was suave, handsome, and had a thrilling French accent. In his 1938 film Algiers, Boyer spent, a lot of time in the Casbah of Algiers-but although his Gallic tones were admirably suited to saying "Come with me to the Casbah," he never used the phrase.
You dirty rat attributed to James Cagney.
Throughout three decades the name James Cagney personified gangster films. Cagney was the craggy-jawed, rasping hoodlum in the snapbrimmed felt hat. Yet he claims that he never said, in any of his films, "You dirty rat" although the line is the
one all impersonators use when they imitate the Cagney style.
Hamlet says the words to his friend Horatio after being handed the skull of Yorick, former court jester.
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
In common usage, "fields" replaces "woods," probably because alliteration with the word fresh" helps it to roll more easily off the tongue.
But the phrase "nation of shopkeepers," or merchants, was already in print when Napoleon was a boy, and it was hardly his own creation. It was used in a political tract by the English economist Josiah Tucker in :1766, later by the Scottish economist Adam Smith in his Wealth of nations (1776), and the same year in Philadelphia by Samuel Adams.
Later, when Napoleon was in exile, the phrase was attributed to him by two biographers. Napoleon's doctor, Barry O'Meara, in Napoleon in Exile, or A Voice From St. Helena, reported a conversation with the Emperor on February I7, I8I7, in which he said of the English, "They are a nation of merchants."
It is clear from O'Meara's text that, while Napoleon agrees with the assessment, he is himself quoting the Corsican patriot Pasquale.
Paoli (1725-I807).
The journal of Gaspard Gougaud, who was also with Napoleon during his exile, certainly shows that the Emperor regarded the English as profit oriented.
But it was Adam Smith's book, which was well known to Napoleon, that said: "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers."
The story was widely circulated at the time and after the Queen's execution. It was held to typify either her stupidity or her callous indifference to the sufferings of the
poor. But there is no evidence that she ever made the remark.
The first reference to the phrase was in the 1760's-in jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions -when Marie Antoinette was still a young girl.
Rousseau relates an anecdote about a "great princess," who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Qu'ils mangent de, la brioche." "Brioche," a superior kind of bread, was the only kind the princess knew-so, in fact, the remark was kindly meant. It is possible that one of France's revolutionaries, who had read Rousseau, ascribed the remark to Marie Antoinette.
But there is no contemporary evidence that the duke made the statement, or even that he is likely to have done so, for he had no great affection either for his school or for the public school spirit. It was only later that these were emphasized as the chief causes of England's military and colonial successes.
When Holmes calls on Watson to ask for his help in solving a mystery, he makes a few deductions about his old friend. He observes, for example, that Watson still smokes the same pipe tobacco-from the ash on his coat-and that he is very busy.
Watson asks how he knows this. Holmes says that Watson takes a hansom cab when he is busy and walks when he is not. Watson's boots are dusty enough to have been outdoors, but not dusty enough for him to have been walking. Therefore, Holmes says, he must have taken a hansom. Therefore, he must be busy.
"Excellent!" Watson says.
"Elementary," says Holmes.
The association arose from Bogart's 1942 film Casablanca. He played a nightclub owner who was haunted by the song "As Time Goes By," because it reminded him of his love for the film's heroine, played by Ingrid Bergman.
In fact, it was Miss Bergman who said "Play it, Sam" to the club's pianist, overcoming his boss' injunction against the song. Bogart heard the tune and realized that his lost love had returned. His wrath for Sam was forgotten.
By the time Boyer made the film he was a famous actor, much parodied and imitated as the archetypal French lover. It was probably through these imitations that the phrase came to be attributed to him.
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