I noted a few of the academic offenses of Ann Coulter earlier. James Downard at Talk Reason has a three-part series fisking Coulter’s recent rants against science, especially Darwinian theories. Here is the third installment, worth a read if you’re interested in what the facts are, and just how far off the rails Coulter’s account goes.
Bad quotes, Coulter, etc. 2
July 28, 2006
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Posted by Ed Darrell
False Quotes Department: Jefferson, Kerry, Tim and Josh
July 26, 2006Catching false quotes is a key goal of this enterprise.
Back in April, Josh at The Everyday Economist linked to Tim Blair with an almost snarky catch of John Kerry citing a line from Jefferson that, alas, Jefferson didn’t write or say. Tim links to The Jefferson Library. It’s short; here’s the entirety of Tim’s post:
No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said: “Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism.”
The Jefferson Library:
There are a number of quotes that we do not find in Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence or other writings; in such cases, Jefferson should not be cited as the source. Among the most common of these spurious Jefferson quotes [is]:
* “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
Jefferson could have said something like that (and did — posts for another time, perhaps). I don’t find this common error nearly so irritating as those where a founder is quoted saying quite the opposite of what he or she would have said, or did say. Read the rest of this entry »
5 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Dissent, Fake Quotes, Famous quotes, Quotes, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson | Tagged: Bogus history, Fake Quotes, Thomas Jefferson | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Einstein, compound interest: Does not compute
July 22, 2006Earlier, in the thread about bad quotes, bad scholarship and Ann Coulter, a person asked about another quote that has dogged speech writers and investment seminars for years:
I am trying to discern the author of the quote “compound interest is the greatest invention of the 20th century.” Since you mention neither Twain nor Einstein remarked this, do you know who did?? I would be very grateful.
Comment by fact checker 07.11.06 [emphasis added]
Twain’s words are well enough cataloged that, had he said it, one would be able to track it down. Think for a few minutes about Twain’s finance issues, however, and you realize it is highly unlikely that he would have said it. Twain invested heavily in a machine to mechanically set type, to publish the memoirs of former-President Ulysses Grant; the machine did not work, and Twain lost his fortune. He undertook a grueling lecture tour to make money back. Later financial setbacks forced another long lecture tour. It is not probable that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) would ever have said anything about simple compound interest. It was not his style to invest passively, or for long-term returns.
The line about compound interest being the “best invention” of mathematics, or of the 20th century, or whatever, is more often attributed to Albert Einstein. Google “compound interest” and “Einstein” and you get tens of thousands of hits.
It’s a good line, a snappy introduction to the Rule of 72 for a presentation to potential investment clients or for the introduction to the rule in a high school classroom. I have a short PowerPoint presentation on the Rule of 72 for economics classes, and I would have used the quote — had it checked out. My experience as a journalist and speechwriter urged caution.
I wrote to the Albert Einstein Institute, to the American Institute of Physics, and to other places where people might know obscure sources of Einstein’s sayings and writings, to try to verify the quote. It surely did not turn up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, nor in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Those specialists in Einstein data and history could not verify the quote (which is the careful way of phrasing it). One fellow I spoke with said if he had a nickel for every time he was asked to verify the compound interest quote, he would have no need for compound interest.
I can say with confidence that Albert Einstein never wrote or said anything about compound interest. While Einstein wrote about a wide variety of topics, compound interest is not among them.
Fatherflot at Daily Kos wrote about this quote in early 2005, after several advocates of privatizing Social Security had used the quote in one version or another to introduce their own remarks. A lot more people read that blog, but no one there could verify it, either. There are several variants on the quote illustrated there. I think that an alleged quote’s lack of veracity is often demonstrated by mutations. For real quotes from real people, generally someone knows the original work and starts writing about what it’s supposed to be — at many cocktail parties a line about “consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds” will be corrected (Emerson said it is “a foolish consistency,” and it is “little minds”), for one example.
Einstein didn’t say what this poster claims he said, either.
As I told fact checker, I think the line was invented 40 or 50 years ago. From my checking, I would bet it was a copywriter or speechwriter working for some investment house. We may hope to someday track down the origin of the quote, and if the originator is still alive, ask her or him why the line was attributed to Einstein.
Fillmore’s bathtub runneth over with bad quotes, hoaxes gone amok, and other errors. We just try to flush a few down the drain.
37 Comments | Albert Einstein, Bad Quotes, Economics, Misquotes | Tagged: Bad Quotes, Compound Interest, Economics, Einstein, Misquotes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Other notable stuff
July 21, 2006History Carnival #35 is up at Air Pollution.
The #7 Carnival of Bad History is up at Hiram Hover. I link there knowing that the carnival may well do better what I try to do here, and I’ll suffer by comparison. All exposure of bad history is good, in my view.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Bad quotes = suspect scholarship (Ann Coulter . . .)
July 8, 2006Partly because I spent so many years debating competitively in high school and college, I cringe when someone misattributes a quote (it’s rather a sin to do that in debate). Worse are those “quotes” that get passed around, often attributed to some famous person, which are complete fabrications.
Then there are quotes that are partly fabrication, and partly accurate. Most often, in my experience, this is done by people on the right of any issue, but it is occasionally a sin of someone on the left as well. The Right Honorable Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars shows wisdom in calling to task someone with whose point he agrees, but who quoted Thomas Jefferson incorrectly. Go see Brayton’s post here, “False Founding Father Quotes From Our Side.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote a lot, but recorded almost all of it. Easy to check whether Jefferson actually said what is attributed to him — but too often, not even a rudimentary check is done. Jefferson didn’t say this, by the way. Image from MemeGenerator.com
Thomas Jefferson is one of a handful of people to whom made up quotes are regularly attributed. Abraham Lincoln is a popular misattributee, too, as are Mark Twain and Albert Einstein (no, Einstein never said anything about ‘compound interest being the best invention of the 20th century’). One would be wise to refrain from repeating anything any speaker attributes to these people, at least until one checks it out to be sure it is accurately attributed.
Two circumstances make for “honest” misattributions. I confuse Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein comments, inexplicably, so often that I have learned to consult the books before saying who said it, if either one springs to my mind. I am sure that more than once in speaking I have misattributed something to one of these ladies, and I know other speakers do it, too. The second circumstance is when someone hears that misattribution and repeats it — the old line about some one “who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad” is often still attributed to W. C. Fields, though it was originally said by Leo Rosten, in an introduction for W. C. Fields, according to Rosten. Generally people will cheerfully correct such misattributions.
Lincoln’s name gets attached to a lot of stuff he didn’t say. He didn’t say this, for example.
Other misattributions have more larceny at heart. Novice speakers will put a quote to a name, more out of fear that their audience will believe them more if they cite an authority or celebrity than anything else.
Cottage industries built up around inventing misquotes plague two areas of public discourse. Ed Brayton is sensitive to them both, as am I. For some reason, advocates of government displays of religion (which are prohibited by 50 state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution) feel that “quotes” from “the Founders” should carry special legal and persuasive weight, if the quotes indicate that the people who established the United States thumped Bibles as hard or harder than Jerry Falwell at a rhythm-and-blues-themed revival.
For example, few weeks go by that I do not get by e-mail a diatribe against “secularism” that claims falsely that our nation’s founders were overweening Christian fundamentalists, as evidenced by the Christian images splattered all over Washington, D.C., and the Bible verses carved in all the public buildings. That is patently false, however. Christian imagery does not predominate in the public art displays in the nation’s capital, but is instead difficult to find unless one is really looking for it. Nor are Bible verses carved in many public buildings — there are perhaps a dozen verses sprinkled throughout the displays honoring knowledge at the Library of Congress, but none I know of anywhere else. These e-mails are not really new. I had heard these claims in speeches, especially at the Fourth of July and at American Legion speech contests, and when I staffed for U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, my office was bombarded with such offerings — often with an invective-filled letter asking why public officials refuse to speak the truth. I often took those documents out on lunch-hour excursions to try to match the claims with the monuments: The claims are false.
Nope, Albert Einstein didn’t say that, either.
Claims continue to be made, and they grow in number and earnestness whenever there is a controversy surrounding an issue of separation of church and state. No, James Madison never said the U.S. government was based on the Ten Commandments. These quotes have great vitality — that false quote from Madison has been uttered by more than one lawyer in the heat of an argument (and no doubt, at least one judge has been unduly swayed by it). Were the quotes accurate, even, they would not change the laws that the founders wrote.
Diatribes against Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution also appear to be fertile soil to grow false quotes. One hoax claims Darwin repented of his theory on his deathbed, the “Lady Hope” hoax. Despite Darwin’s children having refuted that story more than 80 years ago, it continues to circulate. Darwin wrote a lot on a variety of different topics, but almost never about religion. The one or two lines he did write about religion are repeated, and bent, numerous ways. Darwin’s assigned task on his round-the-world voyage, was to assemble the scientific data to back as accurate one of the accounts of creation in Genesis. The evidence Darwin gathered told a different story — but Darwin himself did not think that a good reason to leave the church where he had hoped to be ordained. Especially because his wife, Emma, was so devout, he was careful to avoid any confrontation with the church, and on the rolls he remained a faithful Anglican to his death. His funeral was a state occasion, and he is interred in Westminster Abbey. (We can debate whether Darwin was a “good Christian” some other time, with real evidence.) Building on his earlier belief that observing nature is one way to learn the ways of God, Darwin continued to spend his time in careful, astute and well-recorded observation. His work on the creation of coral atolls is still fundamental; his monographs on barnacles are still wonderful reads. Darwin was fascinated with insectivorous plants, and his monograph on those plants is among the first, if not the first. Darwin was patient enough to sit in his laboratory for weeks to see just how it is that vine twines its way around a pole. Darwin was the model of a truly patient scientist.
However, when any board of education starts to look at new biology books, you may expect to hear Darwin described as something of an anti-Christian monster and a terrible, sloppy, often-wrong scientist. Then to top it off, people will make rather fantastic claims that his own writings deny his case. Other testimony will make hash of the work of other scientists.
Ann Coulter manages to marry both of these worst kind of quote fabrications in her latest book (no, I won’t link to it — you shouldn’t be reading that stuff; go read Stephen Ambrose’s books on D-Day, or Lewis and Clark, instead, and get real mental nutrition.) For those of us who have been watching such things for decades, it is astounding that such slipshod work can get through an editing process and into print. It is interesting to see someone finally merge both schools of scandalous quoting, but disgusting at the same time.
As a speech writer, I felt it was important that my clients have accurate material. A politician using a bad quote can find himself quite embarrassed. As a journalist, I worked hard to assure accuracy, and we had regular processes for correcting errors we did not catch earlier. As a teacher, I think it important that we get accurate facts to determine what happened in history.
Quotations from famous people make the study of history possible, and fun. Winston Churchill said, “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more” (in his 1930 book, Roving Commission: My Early Life).
Be sure you get accurate quotes when you read them.
7 Comments | Bad Quotes, Evolution, Plagiarism, Quotes | Tagged: Ann Coulter, Bad Quotes, Charles Darwin, MIsattribution, Misquotes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ann Coulter, plagiarism, students, history
July 7, 2006Universal Press Syndicate, the company that syndicates Ann Coulter’s opinion columns to about 100 newspapers, announced that they will investigate allegations that Coulter plagiarized material for her columns (see the story in Editor & Publisher).
Surely when higher profile people get caught plagiarizing, it calls attention to the problem. Do these reports serve as any kind of warning, as any deterrent to kids who are tempted to do the same thing? (I am writing a syllabus for a late summer term class at a local university; the school asks that we include language in the syllabus that notes plagiarism is a major academic sin, and is grounds for dismissal. I wonder whether similar standards are imposed in the contracts syndicates give opinion writers? Should not the Coulters of the world be held to standards as high as any college freshman?)
Historians who have been snagged in the plagiarism net in recent years include outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winners like Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose, both of whom had relied on notes from paid researchers, and both of whom quickly apologized and took steps to tighten their attribution and research methods.
Ann Coulter is not in the same league as Ambrose or Goodwin in terms of the quality of her work or the accuracy of her reporting. Were I to bet, I’d bet she will not quickly offer apologies or corrections, nor quickly mend her ways, but that is my experience from inside conservative politics (I staffed the Senate conservative side and had an appointment in the Reagan administration). Of course, I hope I am wrong.
Coulter’s tactics in writing about science do not lend foundation for that hope. Her recent book, to which I will not link, offers three chapters of grotesque inaccuracy about biology and especially evolution theory. She has lifted wholesale sections of a notoriously inaccurate book published by intelligent design harpy Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution. P. Z. Myers’ blog, Pharyngula, is a good place to start on the science inaccuracies, with his post today.
The Fillmore’s Bathtub Challenge: Can you cite any significant claim from any of Coulter’s books that are accurate and can be verified? We should all be from Missouri on this issue. Comments are open.
Coda: Goodwin’s latest book is a fine resource for college and Texas high school history classes: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. I recommend it.
6 Comments | Bad Quotes, Evolution, History Revisionism, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 