Movie Misquotations

[lsanderson]

By FRED R. SHAPIRO
Published: January 15, 2010

Over the last century or so, movie quotations, like pop-music lyrics, have come to replace Biblical verses and Shakespearean couplets as our cultural lingua franca, our common store of wit and wisdom. Yet many of the most frequently cited motion-picture lines turn out to be misquotations. The speech from “Dirty Harry” in which Clint Eastwood says, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” is commonly shortened to “Do you feel lucky, punk?” Michael Douglas’s “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good” (“Wall Street”) is condensed to “Greed is good.” Expressions of James Cagney like “You dirty, yellow-bellied rat” (“Taxi!”) and “Dirty, double-crossing rat” (“Blonde Crazy”) are immortalized as the snappier “You dirty rat.”

Why do we so frequently get the lines wrong? More