While the second, third and fourth sentences were spoken by King in 1957, the first 23 words are the appended thoughts of a US schoolteacher. In a cyberspatial game of Chinese whispers, the distinguishing marks of punctuation become detached as quickly as you can say "retweet". In a short time, the Twitter-friendly opening line ensured that the hybrid phrase was truncated to its first sentence, King's name still affixed.
A number of journalists have since traced the alchemy and transmission of an unknown teacher's thoughts to a misdescribed memetic sensation. Yet the pathologies failed to investigate questions that seem far more fundamental. Why did so many feel impelled to disseminate it? In what way did the attachment of a famous name make it more meaningful? Ruth Finnegan's study makes a remarkable attempt at answering these types of question.
Quotation, with its bedfellows imitation and allusion, is at least as old as written civilisation. Through ever-increasing distances from the present and the personal, this book from the innovative Open Book Publishers (it can be read online for free) works through the thicket surrounding the verbal and grammatical mechanics of quoting. It has enlightening things to say about the Western tradition of compiling books of quotations. Quotation is often used to connect us with the supposed wisdom of the ancients, but humanity has always searched in the past for phrases to help understand the present. Just as books of quotations remain popular today, Erasmus' Adages has been called the first best-seller of the printed age. The Distichs of Cato were compiled in the 3rd or 4th century AD, and Plato has Socrates quote Homer more than 100 times.