Friday 3 June 2022

He Who Hesitates Is

 

The Shield Of Time, 209 B. C., pp. 47-65.

Daniel Handler said, "He who hesitates is lost," according to Google.

Manse Everard thinks, "He who hesitates is bossed." (p. 59)

Other clever misquotes are:

"Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we diet";

"Glory to God in the High St.";

"Travel broadens the behind";

"Britannia waives the rules";

"Sold his birthright for a pot of message."

Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message," then parodied his own aphorism with the title, The Medium Is The Massage. Someone I knew at school had a knack of insisting that he was right when he had just missed a point, e.g., he insisted that McLuhan had said, "The medium is the massage," not "The medium is the message."

Have I gone off the point here? One clever misquotation recalls others.

2 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

Van Rijn was a specialist in them -- and I suspect usually deliberately, from his own p.o.v.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Trying again.

The example I thought of being how one SF writer, who did not like the book, called Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND with the disparaging parody STRANGER IN A STRANGE BED.

Ad astra! Sean