[Ads-l] Request for Modern Examples of Misquotation

[James A. Landau]

On Fri, 18 Dec 2015 15:31:34 Zone-0500 Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
wrote:

<begin quote>

The book I am currently composing will include a discussion of the
genesis of misquotations, and a variety of conjectural mechanisms will
be presented.

Do you, dear reader, know of any examples of misquotation that were in
some distinctive way facilitated by modern communication networks,
social networks, and/or the manipulation of electronic text?
<snip>
<end quote>

You may be interested in what might be called "Murphy's Law on Murphy's Law"

There is evidence that Edward Murphy did not ever give the exact quotation "If anything can possibly go wrong, it will".  There was a discussion on this list sometime ago about Murphy's Law.  I cannot locate that discussion, but the Wikipedia article on "Murphy's Law" contains quotes from at least two ADS members and also gives the dates of ADS discussions on the subject as 12/31/2008 and 5/9/2009.

- Jim Landau

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