[Ads-l] "Evil Empire" in Bartlett's Quotations

[Shapiro, Fred]

I've been studying the new edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.  This new edition continues to be a wonderful anthology of literature.  However, it continues to be surprisingly uninterested in getting the facts of quotation sources right.  There is little evidence that the editor or his assistants consulted the Yale Book of Quotations or quoteinvestigator.com or other reliable quotation reference works.

One example of the weak research in Bartlett's is that it sources the phrase "evil empire" to the film Star Wars.  I am pretty sure that the phrase in the movie is actually "evil galactic empire."

Fred Shapiro

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