{"id":22018,"date":"2013-09-07T00:01:30","date_gmt":"2013-09-07T05:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22018"},"modified":"2013-09-06T15:05:36","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T20:05:36","slug":"qotd-truth-rumour-and-sketchy-footnotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/07\/qotd-truth-rumour-and-sketchy-footnotes\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Truth, rumour, and sketchy footnotes"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>In the <em>Aeneid<\/em>, Virgil wrote <em>Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium<\/em>, which tranlates as &#8220;Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster.&#8221; Fifteen centuries later, William Shakespeare expounded upon this at great length in Rumor&#8217;s prologue to <em>Henry IV, part 2<\/em>. Two centuries later, Jonathan Swift wrote &#8220;Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.&#8221; A century later C.H. Spurgeon said &#8220;Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia while truth is pulling her boots on,&#8221; but it would appear that he was quoting Fisher Ames, who said the same thing thirty years earlier. <\/p>\n<p>Perhaps unhappy with having lifted the quote directly, in 1859 Spurgeon wrote &#8220;A lie will go &#8217;round the world while the truth is pulling its boots on.&#8221; Eighty years or so after that, Winston Churchill slowed falsehood a bit, and then vastly improved the quote with a different article of clothing when he said &#8220;A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Within four hundred years, however, truth could not find the airlock. In a stroke of irony, the previous pedigree was lost, which means that not only did all copies of <em>The Yale Book of Quotations<\/em> go missing, but now falsehood spread throughout the galaxy while truth never left the house. Also, somebody deleted this footnote.<\/p>\n<p>Howard Tayler, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.schlockmercenary.com\/2012-11-18\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Schlock Mercenary<\/em><\/a>, 2012-11-18<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Aeneid, Virgil wrote Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium, which tranlates as &#8220;Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster.&#8221; Fifteen centuries later, William Shakespeare expounded upon this at great length in Rumor&#8217;s prologue to Henry IV, part 2. Two centuries later, Jonathan Swift wrote &#8220;Falsehood flies, and the truth comes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,57,28,41],"tags":[532,864,134],"class_list":["post-22018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-humour","category-media","category-quotations","tag-shakespeare","tag-winstonchurchill","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5J8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22020,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22018\/revisions\/22020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}