I’ve said it and texted it so many times I assumed I must have posted it, but I can’t find it: The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.

Many clumsy verbosities have been massively improved by the battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding.

Two examples. First rock tumbled William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

The raw rock:

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Another is from Hannah Arendt. Rock-tumbled:

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.

Raw:

Human action, like all strictly political phenomena, is bound up with human plurality, which is one of the fundamental conditions of human life insofar as it rests on the fact of natality, through which the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while. If, therefore, by starting natural processes, we have begun to act into nature, we have manifestly begun to carry our own unpredictability into that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.

But because I’m such a repetitious and arrogant person, happy to quote and requote myself poorly, subjecting my own clumsy words to “battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding” until they become nice smooth gems. For example, “The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.”

I’ve been playing with the idea of making a letterpress book on design lifted from Jan Zwicky’s brilliant Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. Each entry will be a quotation, accompanied by an extended reflection on how it illuminates some facet of design. I will be using the improved, rock tumbled version of quotations, not originals.

I love long collaborative traditions. No one person could have made anything as perfect as a bicycle.