Don’t quote me on this

on Sep 06 in Random tagged by Peter Blackman

Quotations are rubbish. You can quote me on that. Quotation websites, generators, lists, automated tweets, Linkedin updates - they’re strangling the internet, wrapping their stiff little choking fingers around spontaneity and wit and squeezing tight and trite.

What’s more, as we become contemptuous of the best of them through familiarity, so the quotation makers seek out more and more obscure examples to keep themselves in business. Where once we were quoted Winston Churchill or Sun Tzu, it’s now Simon Cowell or T’Pau.

Of course the reality is that all this rather pathetic late night anger (time now, 01.24) is simply because I’ve always been rather rubbish at quotations. Especially when it comes to the work environment. An English literature degree has left me with passages of Keats and Shakespeare (to name but two) that I can recite, but I soon learnt as a grad trainee that the client does not want their briefing document described as ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’, nor does your account director want to hear ‘I have of late but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth” when he asks how your day is going.

Other than literature, all that I have to offer on the quotation front is an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Airplane! movies, Blazing Saddles, and Black Adder series 1-4. These are as problematic and dangerous as the pieces of literature that pop into my head. Such as when someone says something as innocuous as ‘Any questions?’ I always feel a powerful urge to ask “What’s the fastest land mammal? Should I fake my orgasms?” (Airplane 1)  or if someone asks ‘Is that a good sign?’ and I respond ‘It does the job’ (Airplane 2). Both of these I have said out loud, to people who have not the slightest idea what I am talking about.

So I don’t quote anymore. My view on quotations is very much that delivered to Howard Johnson in this scene from Blazing Saddles.

“Nietzsche says out of chaos comes order”

“Oh blow it out of your ass Howard”