Graffito: "To Be Is To Do" "To Do Is To Be" "Do Be Do Be Do"

[Laurence Horn]

On Sep 16, 2013, at 8:00 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:

> Thanks for your responses DAD and Wilson. It is interesting, I think,
> that sometimes a major personality will be linked to a signature
> statement / vocalization that is inaccurate or distorted:
>
> Cary Grant: Judy, Judy, Judy.
> James Cagney: You dirty rat.

Not to (hereby) mention all those sports figures, e.g.
Vince Lombardi: "Winning isn't everything, it's the *only* thing"
Leo Durocher: "Nice guys finish last"
Yogi Berra: possibly everything he was supposed to have said, including "I didn't say half the things I said"

although I guess of these only Lombardi is linked to, or defined by, one particular (non-)statement.

And then there are fictional ones, like Sherlock Holmes's "Elementary, my dear Watson" or Ilsa(Ingrid Bergman's character in Casablanca)'s "Play it again, Sam."

LH

>
> Cary Grant actually did say "Judy, Judy, Judy" as recorded in the
> following youtube clip from the 1980s. But his full statement was "I
> never said Judy, Judy, Judy".
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6qPnjcZKC8
>
> In Sinatra's case, DAD notes that sometimes he did say "Doobie Doobie Doo".
>
> A theme of the Quote Investigator website is the fraught relationship
> between the public perception of quotations and the written record.
> Garson
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 7:04 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Graffito: "To Be Is To Do" "To Do Is To Be" "Do Be Do Be Do"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 6:01 PM, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com> wrote:
>>
>>> the public's perception of what he was saying was Doobie Doobie Doo.
>>> For one thing, there would have been no joke otherwise. Check this out.
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3ksf3Oe8cU. If it is what the marketing
>>> folks at Budweiser picked up on, you can bet it was the popular
>>> interpretation, whether or not such interpretation was always accurate.
>>>
>>
>> I could not have phrased it better, myself. ;-)
>> --
>> -Wilson
>> -----
>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
>> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>> -Mark Twain
>>
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>
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