Tuesday, 14 August 2012

You're Braver than you believe: An object lesson on the pitfalls of incorrect referencing.




This evening as I was busy not thinking about as much as I could, that is to say I was avoiding thing as best as I could manage it, though I fail in this enterprise daily with considerable consistency, a quote came into my head. Now I imagine this happens often and to many people, but one would assume the context would precede the quote in many circumstances, in my case this wasn’t so. 

I’d finished watching a very bad episode of an even worse television show, this I do from time to time to assist in the prevention of taxing thought. Anyway I was enjoying those moments immediately after the end of this episode wherein the mind doesn’t need to process anything, and a quote came to my mind. I mulled it over a bit and then I thought “I want to send this quote to someone else, nicely written out on some pretty card in a nice envelope with the least cheesy postage stamp I can find.” Once that thought was completed another one immediately followed with the appropriate suggestion of who to send this lovely card to… my lovely mum of course.

So my next step was to google the quote to be sure I had it correct. This led to a general search which was very useful, the quote was there, and the author was included, however, the source was not. Immediately my much-academically-exploited brain began to question the validity of a quote lacking the adequate reference material. That led to the tracking down of the source, which wasn’t what I had hope, and then a further search to ascertain with absolute certainty that my new information was correct. It was. I was disheartened.

The quote that had arrived in my head is a well-loved Winnie-the-Pooh quote and although it is a masterful collection of words, it was not actually written by A. A. Milne. It was written by a Disney studio writer. The point of this is that in these matters I am a purist, mostly because my mum is a purist, and now I wonder why. I haven’t got an answer, I write about it because I wonder how many genius things I will reject because I am, essentially, a bit of a snob when it comes to literature. Then I remember someone wrote Fifty Shades of Grey and I subsequently remind myself that at some point someone’s really got to draw the line!

“If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you.” - Christopher Robin to Winnie-the-Pooh  (Disney)

All of this having been said, some of the best pieces of dialogue ever written were created by Disney writers, and I quote pop-culture like only someone who is too young to have watched any of the Star Treks in their original era could.

And I hope I never read Fifty Shades of Grey. 

Because I'm a snob like that.



But not snobby enough to not adore this.

1 comment:

  1. Gorgeous El. Such a shame the quote comes from banality but like you said, some of the good ones do come from Disney!

    ReplyDelete

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