Sacred Quotes; Sacred Cows?

It was one of the very first interviews I had ever conducted.

The “famous person” was a friend of mine, so she came over to our house.  I asked for her permission to switch on my audio cassette, to have a back-up for my scribbled notes (yes, I am that  old-fashioned).

We dined our mugs of coffee, shook hands, and she left.  I transcribed the interview, cleaned it up, and sent it off.

Disaster! The so-called proof-reader of the magazine was apparently not familiar with the word “hapless”, and changed it to “helpless” – thereby changing the nuance of the quote completely. Since I had not seen the galley proofs, I could not have known about it – and I only knew what had happened when I received a sarcastic phone call in which my friend both quoted the Italian proverb about people who cannot read their own handwriting, and also pointed out that I ought to have listened to the tape with my “good ear”.

Another time, I wrote a short story which involved one of the characters looking out of a hotel window and seeing what was happing across the bay.

It so happened that the brother of the editor of this magazine had just been fired from the selfsame hotel.  How was I to know? So, without consulting me, the editor changed the venue – to a place from where not even a giraffe would have been able to crane her neck enough to see the action I had described. I hope the story was good enough for the logistics to escape the readers.

These two examples, however, are piffling when it comes to gauging the importance of the printed word.

We are all familiar with the version of “poetic licence” employed by journalists – we chop and change quotes to make them mean what we want them to mean, not what the speaker actually meant them to imply. Then we plead innocence, hand over heart.

Of course, I would never quote anyone verbatim if half of what he said is spasmodic repetition, extraneous syllables, and stumbling to find the right word. I do edit for coherence and syntax, however; but I would never be dishonest enough to doctor speech.

On the other hand, I believe that if I had to go to print with some actual quotes, I would be lambasted for making the speaker look silly or stupid. Wars have been fought over less, and I already have a reputation for occasionally dipping my pen in venom. But unfortunately, some people expect us to quote what they mean, and not what they say.

The solution is simple – only use inverted commas when the sentence is what was actually said. And never combine what the person said to you over an informal drink with what he said in his speech, days later, in the same sentence.

Sometimes, quoted are “fixed” (read “edited”) because they make a zinger of a headline. The trouble begins when, whether inverted commas are used or not, readers assume that the person in the photograph accompanying the article actually said those words. This is also the case with the stand-alone quote that is boxed alongside some articles.

Most of us would remember what Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm had not said to elderly people, i.e. You got a duty to die and get out of the way, as quoted in The Denver Post.  Further editing gave us The New York Daily News’s Aged Are Told to Drop Dead. Colo. Gov. Says It's Their Duty. Further down the line,  The Boston Globe featured a cartoon showing Lamm kicking old people off a cliff.

However, as is the case with many, many anecdotes that are repeated ad nauseam as Gospel truths, what Lamm had said was rather more elaborate; the topic was health care. We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life. He clarified later that what he meant was “death is not optional”.

This interview had been taped – so it was not simply a case of the journalist’s words against those of the Governor. So a correction- in the way of “right of reply” was carried in the morrow’s paper, but there was no suing for libel involved.

The topic of exact quotations recently came up in the news in a totally different context.

To some people, Family Guy is cult viewing – to others, it is hogwash.

However, two British tourists who belong to the former category were recently plonked into hot water for using quotes from the series.

Preparing for their trip to America, Leigh Van Bryan said that he and his friend Emily Bunting were planning to destroy America, and she said they would dig up Marilyn Monroe. They posted these remarks on Twitter, assuming that everybody understood they meant to party till they dropped.

Since The Department of Homeland Security, known to have set up false accounts on Twitter through which it can monitor the use of some words and phrases (Collapse; Deaths; Drill; Human to animal; Illegal immigrant; Outbreak; Recovery; Strain; Trojan; Virus, and more), it could not fail to zero in on the couple... who ended up in handcuffs, in a cage on a van.  From there it was being incarcerated overnight, in separate cells, with illegal immigrants and suspected drug smugglers. Their luggage was actually searched for spades and shovels – and then they were sent back home, having been refused entry into America.

The moral of the above is: always use quotation marks when quoting someone, but never use them when not quoting him to the letter.