Never give in to lazy fact checkers.

I wonder if Winston Churchill would be amused or annoyed if he knew of all the brilliant quotes and witticisms attributed to him that he never actually wrote or said. 

I’ll answer my own question.  I think he’d find the assumption that any clever statement be automatically attributed to him as entirely appropriate, while being insulted by the reckless propagation of the mangled misrepresentations or outright fictions posing as the genuine article.  If you Google “Never give up – Winston Churchill” you’ll get literally thousands of references to an alleged commencement address in which he stood up, repeated “Never give up” three times, and then sat down again. 

Didn’t happen.  What he did was deliver an impromptu talk to students at Harrow School, his alma mater, which contained these words:  “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam.”  He said, “If you played it for her, you can play it for me.  Play it, Sam.”

We don’t know for sure if Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”  Or any of the numerous variants which people also report via Google as if it’s absolute, irrefutable fact.

Except for those who attribute that quote or something similar to T.S. Eliot, who we do know for sure wrote:  "…one of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows.  Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."

We know this because it’s written down, and we can look it up.  As is Churchill’s speech. 

You might say, what’s the harm in a little misquoting?  These are all famous smart guys, and the quotes are close enough, and worth repeating.

Maybe no harm.  Except to the truth.  It seems to me that the lines between truth and fiction are in danger of a permanent blurring with the flood of unexamined information coming over the internet, and the passive disregard presumed professional journalists and commentators seem to have toward accuracy or clarity of meaning, especially when the pesky facts get in the way of their bold assertions or hypotheses. 

We’ve arrived at a point where Rudy Giuliani asserts that “Truth isn’t truth,”  people make jokes about alternative facts or have to pledge their allegiance to the “reality-based community”, or have most of the country still believing that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were golfing partners (they weren’t), or that Democratic operatives printed up millions of fake ballots (they didn’t), it might be a good time to reassert the importance of knowing and telling the truth. 

I did some time as an editor, and I had to make these judgement calls between what is legitimately imagined, and what should stand as facts, things that exist within the world of the book's context that we all recognize.  One recalcitrant writer accused me, after I corrected a blizzard of factual errors and misapprehensions, of not understanding that this was just fiction.  "I can write anything I want," he wrote.  "It's all made up."  

Well, not really.  I believe writers, even mystery writers, have an obligation to get as close as possible to the things in the world that are true, and confirmable, even if we’re writing fiction.  The stuff you make up, of course, is all yours.  But if you’re chasing a car heading uptown, you’re going north.  Camden is across the Delaware from Philly to the east.  (I’ve seen both items improperly reversed.  Fire the copy editor!)

Historical novelists are masters of this.  They know that sweating the details of their period of choice, getting all the essentials as correct as possible, makes their stories that much more believable and fulfilling.  

My personal standard is I never want a lawyer, investment manager, car mechanic, gun expert, forensic scientist, archeologist, drug dealer or cowboy, when reading a relevant passage of mine, ever think, "That's not how it happens. "

By the way, William Manchester, in researching his biographies of Churchill, claimed to have run down every one of those popular attributions.  He insisted that Churchill did indeed tangle with an opinionated English lady one evening who told him, “Winston, you are drunk.”  To which he replied, “Madam, you are ugly.  In the morning I shall be sober.”

That one I choose to believe is true.