I got a copy of the new 16th edition of Bartlett's Quotations the other day. Browsing in it is almost as much fun as eating a dish of Rocky Road.
For many years it has been one of my most used reference books, right after the World Almanac. This is partly because I like to read other people's wise words in the hope that they will rub off on me and inspire me to say something wise some day. But more, it gives insight into the way people have thought through the centuries. It is not a history of language, but it shows a great deal about how language is used and how it interprets values of its time.
The dog-eared edition of Bartlett that has served me so nobly through the years is the 11th, printed in 1939. The new one is the 16th, with a 1992 copyright. The format remains about the same with one major improvement. Now the quotes on each page are numbered so that you no longer have to read the entire page to find the words you want. We moderns want things to be made as easy as possible.
The preface to the first edition, in 1855 said, "The object of this work is to show...the obligations our language owes various authors for numerous phrases...which have become 'household words.'" The editor of the my old 11th uses the preface to reassure those who might fear that "our good old Bartlett had too violently gone modern." The 16th has definitely gone modern but without losing the wonderful richness of the old.
The first entry in the new edition is from the Egyptian The Song of the Harper,
2600 B. C. "Remember: it is not given to man to take his goods with him. No one goes away and then comes back." Just for fun I checked the last entry. It is Kermit the Frog singing, "It's not easy bein' green." When we come right down to it, the values are not all that different, only the means of expression.
I didn't research the number of new names, but I read that there are 340 new ones since the 1980 upgrade. Even knowing that, it is still a little startling to find rock stars Peter Townshend and Grace Slick along with Shakespeare, God (a large section from the Bible) and Sir Winston Churchill.
Politically, in modern times the Democrats out-talked the Republicans by 40 quotes to 23. But that includes JFK, the silver tongued orator. The only presidential spouse since Eleanor Roosevelt to make Bartlett is Barbara Bush. She said in a Wellesly College commencement address, "Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I wish him well."
The book has a wonderful index, but the chief joy is in just browsing, listening to ideas of all kinds of people and the way they express the same ideas differently. J Robert Oppenheimer said, "It did not take atomic weapons to make man want peace, a peace that would last. But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable." Ogden Nash put it somewhat differently. "Maybe I couldn't be dafter / But I keep wondering if this time we couldn't settle our differences before a war instead of after."
Our modern frankness in description hasn't really improved on John Milton's, "so buxom, blithe and debonair." Socrates set the standard for humility, "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance." Lest you thought the phrase, "Leave no stone unturned," is a modern one, Euripides said it in 400 B. C. What modern orator can surpass Daniel Webster's, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable?"
In browsing I found that it was Ogden Nash who said, "Candy is dandy / But liquor is quicker" All these years I thought it was Dorothy Parker. I should have known. And by my old pal, Anonymous, "Beam me up. Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here."
This is a wonderful book for reading. On every page there is something that makes me mutter, "Oh, I wish I had said that."