Daily Archives: January 16, 2010

Eat up.

NFL Football. Grrrrr.

Sunny day in New York. Not too cold. Nice.

Everybody loves the sun in Mr. Bonnard’s world.

Fred Shapiro has a fun piece in the New York Times magazine about movie misquotes:

Why do we so frequently get the lines wrong?

One phenomenon at work, as in the cases above, is compression. Even Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations falls prey to this type of error. It cites “Apocalypse Now”: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.” What Robert Duvall really says is: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ . . . body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like victory.”