Commonly Misquoted Quotes

My dear, I don't give a damn.

Dicere quae puduit, scribere jussit amor

People commonly misquote the old Sacrinomicon and say that money is the root of all evil, which is moronic if you think about it. The real quote is that the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. Not as pithy, but a lot truer.

Two aphorisms I advocate and live by: 1) "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." (Actually, this is a common mis-quotation from the source, George Santayana, who wrote specifically in Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense from his book, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 2) "NO religion can stand up to two words: PROVE IT!" (Source unknown).

To “put up a straw man” is to intentionally caricature a person’s argument with the aim of attacking the caricature rather than the actual argument. Misrepresenting, misquoting, misconstruing, and oversimplifying an opponent’s position are all means by which one can commit this fallacy. The straw man argument is usually more absurd than the actual argument, making it an easier target to attack. It may also lure the other person toward defending the more ridiculous argument rather than their original one. For example, a skeptic of Darwinism might say, “My opponent is trying to convince you that we evolved from chimpanzees who were swinging from trees, a truly ludicrous claim.” This is a misrepresentation of what evolutionary biology actually claims, which is that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor millions of years ago. Misrepresenting the idea is much easier than refuting the evidence for it. Informal Fallacy › Red Herring › Straw Man

A popular piece of common knowledge that is frequently misquoted is that Mozart was buried in a “common grave,” a horrifying injustice when his genius was taken into account. But this term does not mean a communal grave, or the grave of a pauper, but rather the grave of a common man, which is a distinction that separates him from the aristocracy. It was still a modest burial, despite the fact that memorial services and concerts held in his honor in both Vienna and Prague were extremely well-attended.

One common type of mistake in Greek manuscripts occurred when two lines of the text being copied ended with the same letters or the same words. A scribe might copy the first line of text, and then when his eye went back to the page, it might pick up on the same words on the next line, instead of the line he had just copied; he would continue copying from there and, as a result, leave out the intervening words and/or lines. This kind of mistake is called periblepsis (an "eye-skip") occasioned by homoeoteleuton (the "same endings"). I teach my students that they can lay claim to a university education when they can speak intelligently about periblepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton.

[...] Romans 16, in which Paul speaks of a woman, Junia, and a man who was presumably her husband, Andronicus, both of whom he calls "foremost among the apostles" (v. 7). This is a significant verse, because it is the only place in the New Testament in which a woman is referred to as an apostle. Interpreters have been so impressed by the passage that a large number of them have insisted that it cannot mean what it says, and so have translated the verse as referring not to a woman named Junia but to a man named Junias, who along with his companion Andronicus is praised as an apostle. The problem with this translation is that whereas Junia was a common name for a woman, there is no evidence in the ancient world for "Junias" as a man's name.