Word: bartlette
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...Bartlett's own view was that a familiar quotation should be familiar. "The object of this work," said he, "is to show, to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for ... 'household words.' " The New England household of 1855 was devoutly high-minded. About one-third of Bartlett's quotations came from Shakespeare and the Bible, the rest mostly from worthy English poets. Among the unincluded: Washington, Jefferson, Thoreau...
...Bartlett edited eight revised editions, slowly admitting novelties like Ralph Waldo Emerson. At his retirement, he left a literary monument that remained un touched for almost a quarter-century. The year 1914 echoed to the guns of August, and the tenth edition of Bartlett's vibrated with new quotations from foreigners: Lewis Carroll, Nietzsche, Shaw, George Eliot (also, belatedly, Thoreau's Walden, but still no Hawthorne or Melville). The '20s and '30s brought yet another revolution in literary sensibilities, and new Editor Christopher Morley decided in 1937 that the best rule for choosing a quotation...
...Bartlett's editor, Emily Morison Beck, daughter of Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, has reverted some what to Bartlett's original concept of familiarity, and what is familiar today is pop culture. So step aside Shakespeare - a few inches, anyway - to make some room for Bob Dylan ("The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind"), Janis Joplin ("Down on me, down on me/ Looks like everybody in this whole round world/ Is down on me"), Timothy Leary ("Turn on, tune in, drop out"), Wladziu Valentino Liberace ("I cried all the way to the bank"), Yogi Berra...
Wildernesses are In now; belching symbols of industrial power are Out. Abigail Adams? "Remember the ladies" is, of course, obligatory. And, in keeping with its relentless democracy, the new Bartlett's greatly increases the space devoted to the works of Anon. He (she) now provides not only such familiar items as "O.K.," "Kilroy was here" and "Women and children first," but also a cornucopia of cowboy songs, Indian chants and even some less-than-familiar Swahili proverbs ("Speak silver, reply gold...
...think of Bartlett's as literary archaeology," says Beck, ";in which familiar and noteworthy quotations reveal . . . the nature of the age and the people who created them." If so, the 15th edition, with its chorus of sayings by Neil Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, R.D. Laing, Mick Jagger and the rest of the tribe, reminds one of Victor Hugo's platitude about an idea whose time has come, a quotation that Beck calmly assures us Hugo never said. Bartlett would have been proud...