Underwire

I am turning 27 next month.

Now, every age has its famous quote: Taylor Swift has a whole song about being 15, and then another about turning 22; when you’re 17, you’re “young and sweet” according to ABBA, and according to Ladytron, that’s the only age they want you (because “when you’re twenty-one you’re no fun”).

But 27. That’s a literary age. That’s the age when you can wax the truest words ever written: “I’m 27 years old, I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents and I’m frightened.”

Hell, you can even get it on a cake! 

Wow, Jane Austen was so right when she wrote that. 

Oh. Oh. I’m getting word now that Jane Austen never wrote that.

How do I know this? Because I read Pride & Prejudice three times looking for it. More specifically, I read Pride & Prejudice in full twice in a row looking for it, and started it a third time, realized it wasn’t in there, and finished anyway because I love to yearn. 

That line was written by Emma Thompson, Pride & Prejudice (2005) director Joe Wright revealed in the commentary track. I know this because according to my Letterboxd account I watched that movie three times in 2023. Thompson, to her credit, wrote a banger of a line. So much a banger that it’s frequently attributed to Jane Austen in Tweets and Instagram captions. Thanks to the pedantry of the larger Austen fan community, most users are chastised for the misattribution. 

It’s not just Jane Austen, though. Many author’s most famous zingers are actually the invention of screenwriters:

• Frank Herbert never wrote “The spice must flow!”
• Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien never wrote “You shall not pass!”
• The wizard lady never wrote “You’re a wizard Harry!”

But you knew that. Because you spent a lot of time on TVTropes as a child. And you also knew that this trope, really more of a popular occurrence than a trope, is called a “Beam me up, Scotty” moment – another famous line that was never said. Help yourself to the endless list of examples and shatter the illusion your favorite writer didn’t get workshopped by a script doctor. 

Outside of films and TV, quote misattributions are many and closely packed. So often are Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, and Abraham Lincoln given credit for the pithy quotes of others, that attributing obviously manufactured lines to them has become a meme in its own right. Sometimes these quotes are obvious jokes, which is fine. No one with sound mental faculties and/or more than fifteen non-bot Twitter followers thinks Einstein actually said “There is pee without poop, but there may not be poop without “p”.”

But you know who doesn’t know that: that stupid ChatGPT thing that everyone is using these days to write their essays for them. People smarter than I have dubbed the phenomenon, where artificial intelligence makes things up based on things made up by other intelligences artificialle, “hallucinations.” We humans hallucinate too. Well, some humans, diagnosed with various psychological disorders, hallucinate in a more literal sense, but the rest of us hallucinate in the way an AI does – by misremembering.

The process for how it happens with famous quotes from fiction is easy to explain: a movie is far more quotable than a book, since a movie is a necessarily social experience. You see a movie, you are in a room with others who are seeing the same thing as you, and hearing the actor deliver a line in the same way. Later, you go to a party, and you discuss the movie you saw with your friends who also saw the movie, and you all take turns doing an impression of the Baseline Test:

“Cells. Interlinked.”

You can only piece together the parts that stuck out to you. Cells. You’re not going to remember full lines from the script, just the parts that stuck out. Cells. So you default to what’s quotable – what communicates the most information with the smallest room for error. Cells. Interlinked. And now that you’re all doing it, you start to slip in some inside jokes. Yer a wizard! This happens at thousands of house parties a week. 

As a natural-born pedant, these shared hallucinations interest me. I get why they happen and I get how they build camaraderie – I am unfortunately so caught up in getting a quote exactly correct (and if I don’t get it correct no one will talk to me, or want to be my friend, etc) that I miss the forest for the trees: our social fabric is built on misquotations! 

Our daily interactions are peppered with these “Beam me up, Scotty!” bids. So much so that I have never seen an episode of Star Trek in my life but I know and reference the “Beam me up, Scotty!” thing. I can’t tell you how many times my mom and I have donned atrocious Australian accents and crooned “Dingoes ate my baby!” back and forth at each other – another famous quote that no one actually ever said.

These misquotes take on a memetic quality, in the Dawkins-Kojima sense, and allow us to communicate complex ideas with minimal effort (Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?). But these misquotes take on their own literary quality.

Take the first example, the non-Jane Austen Jane Austen quote. To (correctly) quote Jorge Luis Borges: “Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakespeare not literally Shakespeare?” Every time we repeat Charlotte’s complaint, we are the author. We are reproducing Emma Thompson’s genius for an audience, and we are refashioning Jane Austen’s spirit for our situation. This direct engagement, even if per-se wrong, is what matters. Each time we talk about chasing after our own Mr. Darcys, we are as eloquent and expansive as Jane Austen herself. 

And to (correctly) quote R. W. Burchfield: “In a perfect world, familiar lines or passages from the great classical works of English literature, or from famous speeches, would never be misquoted.” Too bad bitch! The value of these meme quotes is not in the delicacies of construction, but despite them: the emotional and intellectual space they allow us to occupy is the basis of their longevity. The poetry of “I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents and I’m frightened,” is dwarfed by how familiar this anxiety is to every 27 year old woman who has no money or prospects (which is to say, like, a lot).

Misquoting historical figures or generating quotations whole cloth actually puts you in good company. Plato apparently truncated and remixed Homer in his writing, and James Joyce’s oeuvre is full of deliberate misquotes to create layers of “metaconsciousness” and evoke that thing your dad does where he gets the lyrics wrong on purpose to make you mad.  

Now, at the age of 26 years and 11 months, can my pedant’s heart grow? If a misquote is equally valuable as an accurate incantation – if we are engaging with art and literature, even when misrepresenting it – if crediting Jane Austen for Emma Thompson’s nimble pen is a credit to Austen, Thompson, and myself… is getting a quote wrong forgivable? 

Absolutely not. Get it right or don’t do it at all.