I know that 'All that glitters is not gold' is a common misquote: are there others we use all the time

asks archiemac:
A. Yes, it should be, 'All that glisters is not gold' from The Merchant of Venice, which sounds much nicer, anyway. Misquotations are so common and well-established that correcting them just sounds pedantic.

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Q. Don't they mean the same anyway
A. Usually they are at least as good as the original and they get the message over. But it's interesting to know what the original quote was.

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Q. What are other common misquotes
A. Shakespeare is often misquoted. For example, 'To gild the lily' is 'To gild refined gold, to paint the lily' (King John IV); 'A poor thing, but mine own' comes from 'A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own'; and 'hoist by his own petard' was 'For 'tis sport to have the engineer, Hoist with his own petar' - a petar being a small bomb which was used to break down a gate.

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Q. What about more recent examples
A. If the mid 19th century counts as recent, then there's 'The law is an ass', which should be 'If the law supposes that, the law is a ass, a idiot' (Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens); and 'Consistency is the virtue of small minds' which comes from 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds' (Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson). Moving to the 20th century, we get 'blood, sweat and tears' from 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat' (from a speech by Sir Winston Churchill); and 'We are the masters now' from 'We are the masters at the moment' (Sir Hartley Shawcross, speaking about the Labour Party).

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Q. Does punctuation come into it
A. Yes, it can change the sense of a quote. For example, 'God rest you, merry gentlemen'� (anon) should be 'God rest you merry, gentlemen' ; and 'Wherefore art thou, Romeo ' (Shakespeare) should be 'Wherefore art thou Romeo ', without the comma, because 'wherefore' actually means 'why ' rather than 'where '

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Q. What about the quotes that no-one ever said
A. Such as WC Fields never saying 'Anyone who hates small children and dogs can't be all bad' - it was said of him by Leo Rosten who was introducing the actor to a crowd. And James Cagney never said, 'You dirty rat!': the nearest he gets is in the film Blonde Crazy (1931) when he calls someone a 'dirty double-crossing rat'. And Charles Darwin did not coin the phrase 'survival of the fittest'. It was invented by Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin's, who used it in his book Principles of Biology.

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By Sheena Miller