Why Do We Quote?

Front matter

Ruth Finnegan

Why Do We Quote?

The Culture and History of Quotation

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Note on Sources

I. SETTING THE PRESENT SCENE

1. Prelude: A Dip in Quoting’s Ocean 2. Tastes of the Present: The Here and Now of Quoting 2.1. ‘Here and now’? 2.2. What are people quoting today? 2.3. Gathering and storing quotations 3. Putting Others’ Words on Stage: Arts and Ambiguities of Today’s Quoting 3.1. Signalling quotation 3.2. When to quote and how 3.3. To quote or not to quote 3.4. So why quote?

Preface

Until this book somehow crept under my guard I hadn’t thought I was much interested in quoting or quotation: something to be deployed with care in some settings, no doubt, but not a thing to be investigated. Certainly I had learned to use quote marks at school and later to wield quotations in academic writing, and had become aware of copyright obligations and the current concerns about plagiarism and about unauthorised words floating free on the web. I was also vaguely aware that words and voices from elsewhere ran through what I said, I read them in books, recognised them in formal speeches, heard them in conversation. But I had just come to accept this as part of common practice, not anything to be really noticed, far less to arouse particular curiosity.

As I thought about it, I realised how little I knew about quoting and quotation. What does it mean, this strange human propensity to repeat chunks of text from elsewhere and to echo others’ voices? How does it work and where did it come from? Does it matter? Why, anyway, do we quote?

I started by reflecting more carefully on my own experience and was startled by how quoting permeated my world. And then I wondered how others were using, or not using, quotation both nearby and in far away times and places. On some aspects I found a vast and fascinating literature. But there seemed no single account that directly tackled my questions about just what ‘quotation’ and ‘quoting’ were, how we had got to where we now are, and how in practice these had been used and conceptualised. This led me to considering how people here and now actually use quotation (in practice, that is, not just according to the grammar books) and also, going on from that, whether we might understand these present practices better by exploring something of their background and whether the problems currently causing concern belong just to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or perhaps have longer roots.

xii Why Do We Quote?

Before I could move on to those wider issues I needed to devote some serious attention to examining what I call the ‘here and now’. So the book begins from a lengthy example from contemporary England. Looking at the present gave me the interest and incentive to dig down further into what lies behind it. For the ways we and others quote now are not just random. Even the small matter of quote marks turns out to have a complex history of development and cultural controversy behind it. I hasten to add that this is not intended as a comprehensive history, certainly not a chronological narrative through from the ‘beginning’, or even systematically through a few centuries of Western history — either would be impossibly ambitious. Rather it uses a series of small case studies to sketch some historical background to where we are today and throw greater light on both past and present. It is only a limited study and largely — though certainly not exclusively — biased towards the products and practices of Western culture. But even that, I found, helped to put some perspective on the practices of today and both the recurrent and the changing patterns behind them.

This book is upside down from many monographs. In moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar and back, its ordering is to go backwards from the present to the past rather than the other way round, and outwards from the nearby to the further-off. It’s in an unusual order in another way too: the first part begins with the personal and local rather than the conventional prolegomena about scholarly literature and theoretical rationale. That academic gesture mostly comes in Appendix 1 and to a smaller extent the footnotes. Between them these two have a dual role for they also function as a pertinent example of the quote-heavy academic style which is currently a prominent setting for quotation.

I’m not sure when the idea of doing a study of quoting first hit me. But once it did it I began to realise that contrary to my first presupposition I was in fact intensely interested in the subject and had been for some time. It converged with themes with which I’ve long been engaged. Being drilled in the contrast of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ reported speech in my earlier classical studies (not just grammar but an immutable law of the universe, it seemed), learning correct referencing modes, tussling with differing American and British citation conventions in journal editing, grading student essays, warning about plagiarising, arguing over quotation in oral as against written communication, or contemplating the transmission of wisdom over the ages and who controls it, the beauties of allusion and

Preface xiii intertextuality in verbal arts, and the multiply-voiced dialogic processes of communication — all this gives a long background to my interest in the words and voices of others. So too does the elusive question of how we interrelate with voices from other places, and, something that in my earlier work on communicating I found most intractable of all, from other times.

Acknowledgements

Let me start by expressing my gratitude to the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Sociology discipline in the Open University not just for research support but also — even more treasured — for their long-continuing warm colleagueship. I also acknowledge with thanks the many libraries and archives from whose resources I have benefited, above all the British Library, the Archives of the Oxford University Press, and the Open University’s Library, that unfailing support over so many years, both on the spot and through its amazing electronic resources and its great Inter Library Loan service. I have been fortunate indeed in my long association with the Open University, its staff and its ideals.

I have very special thanks to the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex and its staff who assisted so generously and patiently in this work (especially Fiona Courage, Jessica Scantlebury and Dorothy Sheridan) and, above all, to the wonderful panel of Mass Observation writers for their thoughtful, full and challenging responses to the autumn 2006 Mass Observation ‘Directive’ about quoting and quotation. Their perceptive commentaries underpin this book.

I also acknowledge with real gratitude the help I have received from friends and colleagues, as well as from scholars who responded in a spirit of generous scholarly cooperation to queries over the internet. Those who have contributed to the long genesis of this text are legion, whether by direct suggestions, by sharing their resources, or just — and this too was greatly appreciated — by their active interest or quiet encouragement. They are too many to list individually but let me at least thank Karin Barber, Anna Bonifazi, Bill Bytheway, Tom Cheesman, the late Desmond Costa, John Miles Foley, Graham Furniss, Marie Gillespie, Michael Hancher, Werner Kelber, Michael Knibb, Elizabeth Knowles, Robert Murray, Chris Nighman (special thanks for his expert assistance on Manipulus florum), Martin Orwin, Anne Seaton (whose email comments are always a delight), Amy Shuman, Paul Smith, Brian Street, Rosalind Thomas, Jason Toynbee, Mark Turin,

Acknowledgements xv

Brian Watson, and David Wilson. I recall too with great appreciation the friendly reception and constructive comments I received at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City in 2004 where I first dipped my toes into this vast subject in a nervous plenary lecture. I am also extremely grateful to the publisher's anonymous reviewer whose thorough reading and advice saved me from many errors. May I also thank those who have helped me with the illustrations and with IT problems generally: in earlier years John Hunt (still a source of support), more recently Sue Searle and, especially, the ever patient Fleur LeCroissette, the IT wizard in the Open University’s Social Science Faculty. And to these thanks let me add, as ever, my appreciation of the huge contribution by David Murray, not just his photographs and his active support but also for the many paths, intellectual and other, that we have shared over the years.

I must not omit to voice my appreciation of Open Book Publishers. It was their unusual combination of vision and realism that drew me to them in the first place. It has also proved a pleasure working with them, in personal as well as professional terms.

In more formal vein I acknowledge with gratitude the many permissions to reproduce copyright material. For the illustrations: Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive (Figs 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.1); The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Fig. 4.8: MS Bodley 819 fol 16; Fig. 4.9 (2): Ms Bibl b 2 (P) £14); Durham Cathedral (Fig. 4.9 (1): C.IV.8 fly leaf); The British Library Board (Fig. 4.9 (3): Additional Ms 11878 f 45v; Fig. 5.2: 11602.cc.8; Fig. 5.6: 1460.a.32 title page; Fig. 6.3: BL Images online 021635; Fig. 8.1: YA.1995.a.2049 title page; Fig. 8.4: T.1948 (1) title page); the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press (Fig. 5.1); Bibliotheque nationale de France (Fig. 5.5: BnF Ms lat. 15985f4r); The Penn Museum (Fig. 5.8: object # B6139); Dr Sara Shneiderman (Fig. 6.1); The Walters Art Museum Baltimore Maryland (Fig. 6.4); The Trustees of the British Museum (Fig. 6.6); The Houghton Library, Harvard University (Fig. 8.3: *93HR-7045). Also sincere thanks to David Wilson (Fig. 4.10), David Murray (Fig. 4.11) and Kenneth Cragg (Fig. 6.2) for their courtesy in allowing me to reproduce material in their possession, to Brigid Duffield for her calligraphic gift (Fig. 1.1), to David Murray again for his photographs (Figs 1.3, 1.4, 7.2) and to Mark Cain (www.cmk.net) for his design (Frontispiece and Fig. 7.3). For textual material: the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce material from the Oxford University Press Archives and the Modern Quotations xvi Why Do We Quote?

Dictionaries Survey; Faber & Faber for the poem “This Be the Verse’ by Philip Larkin (first published in Philip Larkin High Windows, Faber & Faber, 1974); and, with very special gratitude, Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive for allowing me to reproduce extensive quotations from the material produced by the panel of writers responding to the Mass Observation Archive Directive sent out in autumn 2006, material which forms a key element in this volume: my heartfelt thanks both to the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive and (let me repeat) to its panel of writers.

Clearing copyright permissions is a tedious and irksome task, but I would like to express my thanks not only to the organisations concerned, but also to those individuals whose humanity and warmth added a touch of enjoyment to the process, in particular Gordon Wise of the Curtis Brown Group, Catherine Turner of the Durham Cathedral Library, Ruth Bowler at the Walters Art Museum, Martin Maw of the Oxford University Press Archives, and Auste Mickunaite of the British Library.

In a few cases copyright holders could not be traced or did not respond despite our efforts. The publishers would be glad to hear from any that have been omitted.

Abbreviations and Note on Sources

Mass observers, British observers/ commentators

MO/xxxxx

CWE

ODQ

OUP Archives OUP survey 2006

Participant observers/commentators from Mass Observation panel consulted Autumn 2006 (see Chapter 2, Appendix 1 and Appendix 2)

Code number of individual commentator from the Mass Observation panel, Autumn 2006 (full list, Appendix 2), archived in Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex Library, Brighton, UK

Erasmus, Desiderius (1982- ) Collected Works of Erasmus, English translation, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (numerals indicate edition)

Oxford University Press Archives, Oxford, UK

Oxford University Press, Oxford Modern Quotations Dictionaries Survey 2006

I have generally followed the usual academic conventions for referencing and citing primary and secondary sources, but rather than too much peppering of the text have often gathered these in footnotes. I have not attempted to provide detailed references for the many well-known quotations mentioned; to solemnly add a citation for each would make this book unbearably ponderous especially given that readers can readily consult the many print and web collections if they wish to follow up the

(often contentious) questions of author, exact wording or origins. Also, since this work is directed to the general rather than specialist reader I have mostly opted for English translations of texts in foreign languages.

I. SETTING THE PRESENT SCENE l. Prelude: A Dip in Quoting’s Ocean

As I sit upstairs at my desk thinking about quoting, a series of repeated chunks of language and evocations of voices become visible and audible to me. On a shelf beside me stands a calligraphic display framed in New Zealand wood given me by a (not wholly respectful) daughter: ‘If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done’.

“Jf it weren't for the

Anonymous

Fig. 1.1 ‘If it weren’t for the last minute...’ (Calligraphy: Brigid Duffield)

It declares itself as a quotation by the curly double marks at start and finish of the first three lines and its attributed author at the bottom (the famous ‘Anonymous’); also perhaps by its frame, its layout and the white spaces around the displayed words.

By my husband’s desk too is a poster, given by another daughter. This time there are no quote marks or author, but they are certainly not her own words (I have seen them on the web too, again over the ‘unknown’ tag), and their decorative display once again suggests they are being presented as another's.

Dad turns out all right-- in time

4 : My Daddy can do anything. gus Mi Dad | as 8 years: Dad doesn’t know quite everything. 12 years: Oh well, naturally Father doesn't understand. 14 years: Father? Hopelessly dd-fashioned | 21 years: Oh, that man ts out-of-date; what would you expect? 25 years: He comes up with a good. idea now and. then. 30 years: Must find out what Dad thinks abour it. 35 years: A G patience; let's ger Dad's inpur first. 50 years: ‘What would Dad have thought about it bo years: J wish I could talk ít over with Dad once more.

E Ee £ 2 NS

Fig. 1.2 ‘Dad turns out all right’.

In the corridor outside for long hung a scroll with words from the much-loved ‘Desiderata’

Go placidly amid the noise and haste...

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, It is still a beautiful world here with the author’s name, Max Ehrmann, clearly given. Its place and words remain in our memory, though we took it down when it faded.

But it’s not just displays on the walls. Back at my computer I see quote marks scattered through the texts on my screen, and when I search the web for this and that I constantly come on inverted commas, displayed quotations, ‘quotes of the day’, quotations as personal flags in electronic messages and displays, and reported speech all over the place. They come in my own writing too. And around me are some of the hundreds

1. Prelude 5 of books from which I have quoted over the years of an academic life, themselves containing further blocks of words signalled as excerpted from somewhere else. Inside them the familiar © symbol reminds me too of the social constraints exerted by authors or publishers over using others’ words.

On the bookshelves downstairs I see The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations — a long-ago present and the source from time to time of pleasure and information — together with anthologies of poetry to be dipped into, collections of nursery rhymes, and our inherited first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary with its infinitude of quoted extracts from the wonders of the English language. The Bible and Shakespeare are there too — ‘full of quotations’, I’ve been told — and books with titles that evoke yet other words. I open a novel and see epigraphs heading some chapters and dialogues of differing voices through their pages. I notice what look like quotations on a calendar and a tea towel, and remember a friend calling in recently with part of Wordsworth’s ‘A Host of Golden Daffodils’ written on her bag. There’s a fridge sticker too, picked up from an exhibition on ‘The rights of man’ at the British Library:

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear (George Orwell)

The words of others reveal themselves all around.

And I only have to step into the street to find public displays of quotations. Outside a nearby church a large-letter placard propels a biblical quotation into view while at a vet’s practice the Animal Ambulance Service’s motto

“First do no harm” is displayed between double quote marks. A few

hundred yards along the road stands the prominent war memorial, only too frequent a monument in English settlements, inscribed with an often quoted verse.

Just behind is an ancient graveyard, still used and as ever a fertile site for drawing on others’ words and voices in the encounter with death. Its stones are covered in words, not just names and dates but quotations from the Bible or from constantly repeated sayings, sometimes between double quotation marks, sometimes set apart by being inscribed in capitals or gothic lettering: ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, ‘I know that my redeemer lives / and at last he shall stand upon the earth’, ‘Thy will be done’, ‘To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die’. There are longer verses too, many of them

Fig. 1.3 War memorial, Church Green Road, Bletchley, November 2009. The names of the war dead are inscribed above, and below comes the well-known memorial verse ‘Ye that live on/ Mid English pastures green/ Remember us and think/ What might have been’. The poppy wreaths and small crosses at the foot of the memorial had been placed there by Sine ants in the ritual Remembrance Day procession held each November (Photo: David Murray)

commonly used on graves but seldom if ever with attribution to authors. On one it was 8 lines from Frances Crosby’s ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus, / Safe on His gentle breast...’ (see Fig. 1.4), on another one of the many variants on a much-repeated obituary verse

GOD SAW WHEN THE FOOTSTEPS FALTERED

WHEN THE PATH HAD GROWN TOO STEEP

SO HE TOUCHED THE DROOPING EYELIDS

AND GAVE HIS LOVED ONE SLEEP

1. Prelude 7 or, among many others, the less common but still much-quoted

YOU HAVE NOT REALLY LEFT US NOR ARE YOU VERY FAR

BUT ENTERED HEAVEN’S GARDEN AND LEFT THE DOOR AJAR.

In the nearby shops are piles of greetings cards, often with little verses which might or might not be quoted from elsewhere — certainly other words than those of whoever in the end sends the card. There are novels and illustrated storybooks too, spattered with quoted speech and dialogue demarcated in varying ways from the surrounding text. A little further afield, larger shops stock biographies, novels, histories and children’s reading, all again shot through with quoted words and dialogues, and in some shops one or more of the many published collections of quotations. The local newspapers too swarm with quotes and ‘alleged’ words from people they are reporting, quotations are repeated or cleverly twisted in the advertisements that decorate their pages, and there is often a special section for quotes of the day or week. There’s a similar pattern in the specialist magazines that crowd the display shelves and reappear in doctors’ surgeries and other waiting rooms where I and others enjoy flipping through the quotations pages as we wait.

On the road too I see quotation marks in advertisements, and slogans on the sides of lorries and backs of cars. A van uses inverted commas to enclose its promise of ‘A tool for every task’, another advertises a special offer by a colourfully-lettered proverb, ‘The early bird gets the worm’, and on the back of a long-distance lorry I note the grand quotation (well — it was in large letters set within double quote marks) “We're making a lot of noise about our softest ever toilet tissue”.

I am also aware of the children trooping in and out of the local schools where they will be instructed in the conventions for ‘speech marks’, a key stage in the primary curriculum. As the years go on they will also learn conventions for other uses of quotations, not least about utilising quotations from literary and other set texts and how to cite them in essay and examination.

And as well as visible text there is auditory quotation too. Children interchange rhymes and ditties in the playgrounds, parents repeat nursery rhymes. We echo the words from well-known songs or hear the ringingly familiar passages from the Bible in church readings or public ceremonies. In my own case I may no longer often quote aloud from the classical writers that

Why Do We Quote?

Fig. 1.4 Graveyard quoting.

Gravestones in graveyard by St Mary’s Church, Bletchley, three examples of the many with quotations (photos: David Murray)

1. Prelude 9 delighted my school and college days or the many biblical and poetic texts I learnt and repeated at school — but they still evoke memories, acoustic not just cognitive. I do occasionally enjoy showing off to non-Latinate relations by declaiming Quadripedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum, one of my father’s favourite lines - mine too — from Virgil. No literal translation can capture it (it’s roughly ‘The hoof with its four-footed sound is shaking the powdery plain’) but once spoken and felt with its sonic syllables and stirring hexameter rhythm it resonates with the sight, sound and tremor of a galloping horse’s hooves striking the crumbly ground. I realise too that quotations from great writers and revered works swim through my speech, if only in abbreviated form, with echoes of sound as well as sense: ‘Uneasy lies the head... ‘, ‘Full of sound and fury’, ‘Some more equal than others’, ‘All hope abandon...’. I also catch myself quoting a variety of proverbs or, perhaps more tactfully, silently rehearsing them: the words of others live in the mind, not just on page or placard. Two of my favourites are the (abbreviated) ‘A watched pot... ‘ and ‘Two birds with one stone’; just the other day it was ‘More haste less speed’ at a church meeting. So too with the small but colourful phrases that lace conversational interchanges — ‘Power corrupts’, ‘Money talks’, ‘Shoot the messenger... “: familiar phrases indeed but still with that resonance about them that evokes the feel of quotation. And when small children are around what should come out but snippets from long-quoted nursery rhymes.

And then again quoted dialogue is not just something in books but a common part of everyday life as we repeat what we have heard from others. I do it myself. Sometimes knowing well what I’m at, sometimes (I now realise) much less consciously, I echo the words and voices of others. I notice others doing the same, attributed or not, extensively or not, and regularly regaling pieces from conversations they have heard or been engaged in or, perhaps, imagined. I hear and overhear the familiar sequences of ‘he said’, ‘she said’, ‘I said’ in a multitude of situations, from my own home to interchanges on bus, street, coffee morning, school playground and hospital.

My experience has been moulded too by family sayings, not just from the present generation but also ones that have come down the years. I recall words and voices from my younger days and at times still use them with other family members today. We quote my father’s ‘If you want something done ask a busy man’, words I still hear in his voice and have always taken as his own -not originated by him, I now realise, but anyway we pass them on in his name. Still mimicked with affectionate amusement is my father’s reproachful

‘Now dear...’ (in a tone which conveyed anything but endearment) and we remember too — and still sometimes repeat — his rendition of

I sat next the Duchess at tea

It was as I knew it would be

Her rumblings abdominal

Were something phenomenal

And everyone thought it was me.

My mother’s favourite was Blake’s

Tyger tyger burning bright

In the forest of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry...

which I always associate with her bright-eyed delivery. My mother had her favoured maxims too. No doubt many came from elsewhere but they became personal to her, and to us, and we still quote and think of them as hers:

When in doubt tell the truth.

Don’t expect life to be fair.

You don’t have to like your neighbours but you have to get on with them. Be good — but if you can’t be good be clever.

Or again there was her familiar admonition, with the additional flavour of its further inner quotation,

As your father always used to say, ‘On the whole it is best to keep to what has been arranged’.

In the younger generation we have the exaggeratedly pronounced ‘End of the world...” — mocking, and hopefully pre-empting, over-thetop reactions to some colossal but, well, really not in the end so very world-shattering, disaster. My mother’s rather effective version, still well remembered, was ‘Well — in the context of world events... ?’.

And amidst the wider family of the spreading Finnegan descendants we can scarcely avoid sometimes singing the odd verse or two of the silly but engagingly self-teasing song we inevitably share

There was an old man called Michael Finnegan He grew whiskers on his chinnigan The wind came out and blew them in again Poor old Michael Finnegan

Beginnegan [Begin again].

1. Prelude 11

Now that I have come to notice it, I see that not just as academic citer of others’ words but everywhere I am bound into a web of words and voices from others, both serious and light-hearted — shiftingly-crystallised repeated gobbets of text, tones of multiply re-sounding voices. Quoting and quotations are interwoven into my life and into my interactions with others — and quoting, no doubt, in many senses of that term, though I’m not always sure exactly what or how.

So much for myself. But I have increasingly come to wonder how far my experience matches those of others; and since quoting is not just an individual matter, what are the social arrangements and conventions that promote and facilitate it, and the definitions — perhaps changing over time?

— by which people mark out ‘quotation’. Is it indeed a universal human propensity or so culturally variable as to be impossible to pin down? Just what quoting is, what counts as ‘quotation’, where it comes from, and how others practise and experience it demand further exploration.

The answers to such questions doubtless lie in part in the far away and long ago of quoting: the long-lived published collections, the developments and institutions of the past, and the literary and grammatical conventions we inherit. But it may be equally pertinent to first gain some insight into the present, into how people engage with quoting here and now. I knew what the school books prescribed, but not so much about how people today actually use quoting in practice and what they think about it. So that is where I start.

2. Tastes of the Present: The Here and Now of Quoting

Well, I’m quite likely to quote from almost anything. Certainly conversations I've had or heard, lines from plays, lines from poems or books, newspapers and magazines, the Bible, catch-lines from comedy shows. Not jokes (Retired claims assessor, East Sussex)!

I thought I didn’t quote much. My husband pointed out to me that in his opinion I was wrong (33 year old primary school teacher, Yorkshire)’

What do people quote, and how? Where do they find their quotations? And what do they think about quoting? Since my own experience only goes so far, the next two chapters take a look at how some present-day people are engaging in quotation in the everyday life of here and now.

2.1. ‘Here and now’?

Not that ‘here and now’ is simple to pin down. Even in the most local of local settings people follow diverse ways, and, as we know well, local patterns do not stand alone but interact with others across the world and the generations. To add to the complexity, any population contains people of many ages whose experiences and memories span many different timescales.

But if there is no single ‘here and now’, it is still worth starting out not from a generalised invocation of ‘what we usually do’, let alone grander terms like ‘the normal practice’, ‘our contemporary assumptions’ or ‘ordinary people’s experience’, but from a specific time and place. So my intention here is to take a slice through people’s practices in Britain today,

1 Mass Observer MO/B1898 (for further information see following section, also Appendices). 2 Mass Observer MO/W3816.

especially but not solely those in England. It is only a slice, a limited one. But it follows the general spirit of the ethnographic studies of speaking and of writing which have led to so much insight by focussing on the actions of particular people at identifiable moments of time and place.* Here it can afford us a closer look at certain specific quoting practices of today before the more historical and comparative perspective of later chapters.