[Ads-l] An apocryphal quote that we don't need to wait for a QI column to debunk

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Thank you for highlighting this reference to the QI website in the New
York Times, LH. Also, thanks to Nicholas Kristof and the editors at
the Grey Lady for caring about the genuine provenance of quotations.

In the past, I monitored the incoming traffic of the QI website
looking for traffic spikes. But Google web statistics have become
increasingly complicated and opaque which makes it more difficult to
trace incoming traffic. If a list member sees a reference to the QI
website in the mass media I would appreciate being notified.

Earlier this month, Joel Snape at the Guardian referred to the QI
article which discussed the quotation: "If you get a tough job … and
you haven't got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it".

Last month David Murdock at USA Today referred to the QI article about
the Churchill misquotation: "This is the sort of nonsense up with
which I will not put!"

Garson

Here are the links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/opinion/trump-biden-america.html
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/13/decades-weeks/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/10/big-beautiful-goals-but-cant-be-bothered-11-great-productivity-tips-for-lazy-people
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/26/lazy-job/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/lifestyle/columns/2024/06/07/david-murdock-on-searching-for-an-idea-hey-look-its-a-bird/73969701007/
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/

On Sun, Jul 21, 2024 at 3:56 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> In a column in today’s NYT, Nicholas Kristof writes:
>
> What a week! It feels like August 1914, a fulcrum in the sweep of events. These days may have moved the arc of America and the world, with history lurching in competing directions in ways that may shape our course for decades.
> “There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen,” Lenin is widely quoted as saying. In fact, he probably didn’t say it <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/13/decades-weeks/>; please excuse my effort at fact-checking as a token pushback to our Leninist dialectic of exaggerations, deceptions and conspiracy theories that were all highlighted this week.
> I read that in the hard copy that comes to our door, and was all set to ask Garson about the line (which I’ve since heard repeated in an MSNBC interview with presidential historian Jon Meacham after Biden’s withdrawal from the race—sorry for the lack of a spoiler alert if anyone hasn’t been checking their phone or other news sources) but when I turn to the online version of the column to provide the link I see that Kristof, and Garson, already beat me to the punch:
>
> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/13/decades-weeks/
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org