Life quotes misquotes: five internal dating clues

You can often spot life quotes misquotes without opening an archive at all, by reading the sentence carefully and noticing that it contains a word, a concept or an image that did not exist when it was supposedly said.

This is the cheapest technique in the field and the most neglected. It takes two minutes and needs no subscriptions. For sayings about life it works unusually well, because that material is constantly credited to ancient and medieval figures while phrased in vocabulary from the last hundred years.

What to take away

Five internal dating clues

Word age. Some words are simply younger than the person credited. The Oxford English Dictionary records first attested uses for words and for senses, and most public libraries provide access to it. This is the crudest test and it still catches a surprising amount.

Sense age. More productive than word age, because it is less obvious. A word can be centuries old and carry a meaning that is not. Several words at the center of modern sayings about living have older meanings that were physical or technical and a newer meaning that is psychological. Check the sense, not just the spelling.

Concept age. Some ideas required a body of thought that did not exist yet. Vocabulary about the self as something to be managed, developed, protected or optimized belongs to a particular period of writing about persons. A line credited to an ancient source that presupposes that whole framework is describing a modern preoccupation in old dress.

Metaphor age. The most useful of the five, and the subject of the next section.

Register age. Even where every word is old enough, the tone may not be. Therapeutic register, managerial register and self-help register each have a recognizable shape: the imperative addressed to a general "you", the abstract noun as a goal, the second-person promise. These conventions have histories, and a sentence written entirely inside one of them is from that convention's period.

The metaphor clock

Every metaphor has a source domain, and source domains enter ordinary speech at datable points.

A saying that compares living to running an engine, a balanced machine, wiring, rewiring, or circuits cannot predate the technology it borrows from. Nor can one that uses pressure and release, programming, resetting, bandwidth and capacity, or a network.

More usefully, it cannot predate the point when that technology became common enough for its metaphor to be understood without explanation. That is much later than the invention.

The same applies to metaphors from finance, from sport, from photography, from broadcasting, and from travel by air. Each one puts a floor under the sentence, in exactly the sense an archaeologist means by a terminus post quem, and the floors are often centuries above where the attribution sits.

Two cautions. Some images look modern and are not: metaphors from weaving, milling, sailing, agriculture and warfare are very old, and mistaking them for recent is the standard false positive. And a translator working today will reach for today's images, which is the subject two sections down.

Reading the signals

The last row is included because people mix the two tests. Rhythm is evidence about how much a sentence has been handled, a separate question from when it was composed. Treating a polished line as a modern one on that basis is unsound. What the sound of a saying tells you and what its vocabulary tells you are different instruments.

The translation objection

Someone will say, reasonably, that the modern vocabulary is the translator's and proves nothing about the original. That objection is correct, and it constrains the technique in a specific way rather than defeating it.

What survives the objection:

What does not survive: any claim about the author's own words, and any claim about the age of the idea. Both of those need the ordinary work of unwinding the chain of who cited whom.

What internal evidence is good for

It flags. It does not convict.

A strong anachronism tells you the wording is later than the attribution, which is enough to stop you using the line as a quotation from that person, and enough to change your label from a credit to "attributed". That is a real result and often the only one available.

It does not tell you who wrote the sentence, when exactly, or whether an older version existed underneath. It does not distinguish a fabrication from a loose modern paraphrase of a real passage, which is a distinction that matters and requires the archives.

Naming the author is a separate job from dating the wording. The standard references for attribution are the Yale Book of Quotations, which gives sources for the lines it prints, and Quote Investigator, which traces the history of individual sayings. Both are worth checking before you pass a line on as a credit.

Run the test in the other direction as well, and a line whose vocabulary, senses, and images fit its claimed period has passed something and merits a proper check.

So much of this material carries the fingerprints of the century that anthologized it rather than the one it claims.

Common questions

Is one anachronism enough to reject a line?

One clear one usually is, for the wording. Be careful that it is clear: check the word's history rather than your impression of it, because intuitions about which words sound modern are unreliable and biased toward rejecting plain language.

What if the anachronism is in only one circulating version?

Then you have located an edit, which is useful. Compare versions, find which ones lack the modern element, and search those. The older-sounding variant is the better search string and often the earlier form.

Does this work on lines credited to people from the last century?

Less well, because the vocabulary gap is small or absent. For recent attributions the productive tests are documentary rather than internal: recordings, published texts, and contemporaneous reports.