BACKPAGE

Revenge is a dish best stolen from Confucius

Nury Vittachi on where quotable quotes come from

In ancient times, when it was legal to leave Hong Kong, I found myself sitting next to a smartseeming guy at a lunch in Singapore who came out with a bit of wisdom. “I used to have an incredibly intelligent teacher,” he said. “He said: ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’.”

Huh? Okay, that was a quotable quote—but it surely wasn’t from this guy’s teacher. “Your teacher didn’t say that,” I replied. “He nicked the quote from…. well, one of those dudes whose job it is to spout quotes.”

Fact: everything wise or witty ever said, came out of the mouths of one of four people: Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Confucius and Winston Churchill. (According to the internet.)

You can add their names to any phrase or statement and it sounds right. I use this all the time. Just try it. Tomorrow, say to your spouse: “Morning! As Oscar Wilde used to say.”

Doing this makes you sound incredibly erudite, or, as my wife prefers to say, “a total dork”.

I Googled the “one-eyed man” quote. Wikipedia said it was Desiderus Erasmus, whom I had never heard of and who I suppose could have been that guy’s teacher, although it doesn’t sound very Singaporean, since I believe the law requires everyone in that city to be surnamed Tan.

That afternoon, someone made a speech at the conference that several other Hongkongers and I were attending: “With great power comes great responsibility, as Spider-Man teaches us.”

As Spider-Man teaches us? I can remember that or very similar phrases being used by grandiose newspaper owners in London’s Fleet Street long before Spider-Man movies. When it was my turn to hold the microphone, I decided to see what the crowd in front of me thought was the origin of what is probably the most misattributed quote in history: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

The crowd, just like the internet, attributed it to everyone from Mel Gibson to Hello Kitty—and she doesn’t even have a mouth! As for hard-drinking Mel, I think “give ush anuvver beer” is closer to his idea of a deep philosophical statement.

A narrow majority of people thought the phrase was a Klingon saying from a Star Trek movie. It appears in the opening sequence of the movie Kill Bill, identified as an “Old Klingon Proverb”. A few intellectuals in the audience were quite sure it came from Hamlet. It doesn’t, but sounds like it should. Shakespeare is no doubt spinning in his grave thinking, “Forsooth, dammit, why didst I not thinketh of that?”

Actually, the phrase first appeared in the UK in the late 1800s. (The French claim it comes from the 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuse, but this argument can be dismissed, because it doesn’t. The French clearly haven’t read it.)

Historians in Britain discussed this precise phrase – “revenge is a dish best served cold” - in various books without specifying who said it first, so we can assume it popped up in London’s parliament around 1880, long before the Klingon days.

I once found myself pleasantly stuck in a hotel in Shanghai with Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. For amusement, we looked up “Matt Groening quotes” on the internet and found vast numbers of one-liners that came from his character Homer. Matt didn’t even write them: they were penned by TV scriptwriters.

But going back to fake quotes, I was sorry to hear that one of the most famous Asian quotes (and there are not many from this side of the world in quotation books) is also fictional. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping never said: “To get rich is glorious.” In fact, the experts say no one said it.

In which case, I’ll say it. AND I’ll improve it: “To get rich is glorious so how about a pay rise, boss?” As Oscar Wilde used to say. Or Spider-Man. Or Confucius.

Nury Vittachi is an award-winning author and journalist based in Hong Kong. He is best known for his comedy-crime novel series, The Feng Shui Detective. Contact him via nury@vittachi.com or through his public Facebook page.