Famous quotes we've been getting wrong, from Robert Frost to 'Don't mess with Texas,' with Eli Burnstein

Mignon Fogarty (0:06)

Grammar Girl here, I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Eli Burnstein. He's going to tell us that Robert Frost wasn't really recommending The Road Less Traveled. Marie Antoinette didn't actually say, let them eat cake and don't mess with Texas, wasn't an aggressive state motto. Eli's new book, Phrased & Confused, looks at what happens to famous quotations after they leave their original contexts. Eli, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.

Eli Burnstein (0:33)

Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Mignon Fogarty (0:35)

So what made you want to write a book about quotations people think they really understand but might not?

Eli Burnstein (0:40)

Well, I've always collected quotes that I loved. And I think over time, I discovered that the ones I liked best were paradoxically the ones I understood the least.

So suddenly I had a list within the list of quotes that I wanted to learn more about and kind of in tandem with that, I started noticing this second class of confusable quotes, which is quotes that we just plain get wrong. So there are ones we don't get that well at all, or at least ones I don't get that well at all. And then there are ones that are commonly misunderstood. And I thought it would be fun to explore both types of quote in a book, kind of devoted to this concept of confusion.

Mignon Fogarty (1:20)

Yeah, no, it's really fascinating. Okay, so let's get into the phrases. So the first one that is on my list is, I think, therefore I am. I mean, how do people misunderstand that?

Eli Burnstein (1:30)

So that's an example of a quote that isn't misunderstood so much as not very well understood at all. And that is a shame because it is a quote that in over 2,000 years of philosophy is arguably considered or widely regarded as the most famous and perhaps the most important. So that's a pretty impressive feat for, you know, two millennia of philosophy scribbling away.

As for what it means and why it's important, well, what it means strictly speaking is this figure, René Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician in the 1600s, was trying to establish a kind of stronger foundation for knowledge than the senses, right? What we see and what we hear, we're often wrong about. And he was concerned about this, that, you know, we cannot really build knowledge if we don't have strong foundations. And if we're wrong about what our eyes tell us, then how could we have certainty? And so he kind of engaged in this exercise where he would begin to doubt everything that he was capable of doubting so that if something could be wrong, let's just assume that it is wrong because, you know, between optical illusions or tricks of distance or memories or dreams, we were tricked all the time into thinking things are real that aren't. So he says, let's just throw all of it out the window and see what's left. And through this exercise of what is sometimes called radical doubt, he came to this foundation where he said, well, the one thing that I cannot doubt is the very fact that I'm doubting. It's a very simple insight, but in order to, you know, throw all this stuff out the windows, you know, what your eyes see, what your ears here, you must somehow be there to do the doubting. Or as he kind of famously summarized it, I think therefore I am or in Latin, cogito ergo sum, right? So long as I'm, you know, engaging in the practice of wondering about whether or not something is real or doubting, I must somehow be there to do that. And although it is a simple insight, it is really an important concept because it really captures the spirit of the modern times. So, you know, it's considered emblematic of the end of medieval thinking and the beginning of modern thinking, because instead of just looking around and saying, oh, look, the sun rises and it goes over our heads and it disappears at night, the sun must be orbiting the earth.

Suddenly, he says, no, we can't just take in what our senses tell us wholesale, we need to use our minds, we need to use our reasons and subject everything that we see to this new principle of irrational scrutiny. So it's an extremely important line and marks a real turning point in the history of philosophy and science and mathematics.

Mignon Fogarty (4:07)

It made me think of the current debate over whether AI is conscious or not. And I think the most interesting thing about that debate for me has been learning how much philosophers over the hundreds, thousands of years have disagreed about what it means to be conscious. Like they don't even all agree. I mean, not even close to agreeing.