This article was taken from the August 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Remember Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn"? Except it seems not to have been his.
At quoteinvestigator.com, a blogger who goes by the pen name Garson O'Toole traces the history of popular phrases.
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Elvis Costello
Or was it Frank Zappa? "My research into quotations was motivated by a long-standing interest in large-scale electronic libraries," says O'Toole. He found this saying originates with US screen actor and comedian Martin Mull, who opened a gig for Zappa.
"Wire telegraph is like a very, very long cat."
Albert Einstein
This bizarre explanation of radio communication is attributed to Einstein, but a version (with a dog in lieu of a cat) appeared in a newspaper in 1866, in which the journalist claimed to have overheard the "most ludicrous conversation" from French peasants.
"Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
Bertrand Russell
Prominent figures such as Russell are often wrongly linked to quotes. "The person with the largest number of misattributions is Mark Twain," says O'Toole. The source of this one is in fact a 1912 novel called Phrynette Married, by Marthe Troly-Curtin.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
Pablo Picasso
Picasso supposedly said this about either calculators or computers. O'Toole traced a 1964 interview with the Paris Review, which quotes the artist as responding to "the enormous new mechanical brains or calculating machines." Sounds like a computer.
And the baby-shoe story? It seems that several newspaper columnists had the idea first, and the earliest print evidence linking Hemingway to the tale appeared long after his death.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
