From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 11:10:16 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 11:10:06 -0400 Received: from geos.coastside.net ([207.213.212.4]:14555 "EHLO geos.coastside.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 11:09:53 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: In-Reply-To: Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:09:46 -0700 To: Alan Cox , jordanc@Censoft.com From: Jonathan Lundell Subject: Re: [OT] Re: When the FUD is all around (sniff). Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org At 4:02 PM +0100 2001-06-26, Alan Cox wrote: > > > There is a saying in he UK 'You can fool all of the people some of the >> > time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you >>cannot fool all >> > of the people all of the time'. >> >> Didn't Abraham Lincoln say that? :) > >[Digs] >Indeed in 1864. Perhaps, perhaps not. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/970217/17linc.htm >What Zall did with the plethora of Lincoln anecdotes--include and >evaluate the apparently authentic, delete the seemingly >apocryphal--other historians are doing with collections of his >words. Their task is daunting: No American is more quoted--or >misquoted--than Lincoln. Their work also is important: The image of >Lincoln, the historical as well as the mythical, has been shaped to >an uncommon degree by statements that other people put in his mouth, >often to suit their own purposes. > >Stanford's Don Fehrenbacher and his wife, Virginia, spent 12 years >compiling the Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford >University Press, 1996, $60), a collection of 1,900 quotations >attributed to Lincoln by more than 500 of his contemporaries. The >scholars rated the authenticity of quotations with letter grades: A >for a direct quote the listener wrote down soon after hearing it; B >for a quickly recorded indirect quote; C for quotes reported weeks, >months, or years later; D for one "about whose authenticity there is >more than average doubt"; E for those "probably not authentic." > >No fooling. One now familiar line the Fehrenbachers examined was far >from familiar to 19th-century America: "You can fool all the people >some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you >can't fool all the people all of the time." The saying apparently >first emerged in print in 1901 in Lincoln's Yarns and Stories; the >book identified the person who allegedly heard Lincoln as "a caller >at the White House." Years later, two old-timers claimed they had >heard Lincoln say it in an 1856 address in Illinois, but a news >account of the speech didn't mention it. The Fehrenbachers give the >old-timers' recollections a D. The evidence, the scholars say, >"suggests that this is a case of reminiscence echoing folklore or >fiction." -- /Jonathan Lundell.