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Play it again, Sam

Merlin

Familiar Face
Messages
66
Location
Massachusetts, USA
Movie misquotes

Interesting, ain't it? Nobody on the original "Star Trek" series ever said, "Beam me up, Scotty", either, yet it's become ingrained in the popular consciousness as an actual quote. Neither did Rhett Butler say, "Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn," but rather, "Frankly, my dear. . . "

Y'know, this could be the beginning of a beautiful thread. . .
 

Sergei

Gone Home
Messages
400
Location
Southern Belarus
"Elementary, my dear Watson" - Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

This quote is not actually found in any of his books, but rather found in a film review in the New York Times, 19 October 1929.

There is a site dedicated to "misquotes". The aforementioned Casablanca quote is noted here:
http://www.saidwhat.co.uk/misquotes.php

People often mistake me for saying: " I did not have ....relations with that .." - nevermind.

-Sergei
 

IndianaGuybrush

One of the Regulars
Messages
232
I took a class on human memory when I was in college and one of the things I have found out about it is, our most vivid and realistic memories are most likely to be incorrect.

Psychologists have been doing studies on memory for a long time, and just a few that spring to mind are:

The day after Kennedy was assasinated they asked a group of people to write down what there were doing, who they were with, where they were going etc...
In other words, they asked this group to narrate what was happening when they heard. Ten years later they asked these same people the same questions, and had them compare their story now to their story then. Any guesses on the results? No one got their own story completely right. Errors varied from small (what they were wearing) to enormous (who they were with, where they were, what they were doing).

The same experiment was repeated when the Challenger shuttle exploded, with the same results.

Human memory is a notoriously slippery thing. The fact, gandydancer, that you insist on having seen it a different way is a testament to that. It doesn't make you recalcitrant or stubborn, rather, it shows just how vivid our erroneous memories can be.

My professor gave another anecdote. It involved him having a very fond memory of listening to a baseball game with his father when he was very young. He remembered everything about this memory with great vividness. He could remember who was playing, who was winning, and what inning it was. There is only one problem. He clearly remembered the game occuring during the winter, and baseball is only played in the summer (into fall for those post-season games). The memory is contradictory. Either he was listening to a football game, or the game actually took place in the summer. He can't remember which at this point, and there's a good chance that the memory is actually a mix of two or more memories he has. But it was a mistake he didn't catch until his adulthood, when he became interested in the field of human memory.

Andykev, I think what he meant about his father meeting Mark Twain was showing how a vivid memory can in fact be false. It's obvious that his father couldn't have met Mark Twain in that year therefor the memory is incorrect. I think gandydancer was showing that maybe his family has a history of having vivid imaginations, thats all.
 

gandydancer

Familiar Face
Messages
95
Location
Blue Ridge Mountains of NC
IndianaGuybrush said:
Andykev, I think what he meant about his father meeting Mark Twain was showing how a vivid memory can in fact be false. It's obvious that his father couldn't have met Mark Twain in that year therefor the memory is incorrect. I think gandydancer was showing that maybe his family has a history of having vivid imaginations, thats all.

Eggzactly!
 

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