When is a Quote not really a Quote?

You've probably seen the following quote a million times before as it crops up in all sorts of places on the internet, mainly in people's signatures ... the little bit of sign-off text in an email or usenet/bulletin-board post to help distinguish them from the rest of the noise...

I'd rather die peacefully in my sleep like my Grandfather,
than screaming in terror like his passengers.

Now I've been using this .sig line for many years, since at least 1994 according to the Google archive, which seems about right as I'd been posting to Usenet since around 1991 but only at that point had my .sig become stable, and more or less unchanged to this day. I've become quite attached to this little saying and see it as my "own", even though it is not. I've also seen many a variation (the only bit that seems to be constant is the "die peacefully in my sleep" bit) and it kind of pisses me off when people take such a simple phrase and turn it into something it's not.

The whole point of the phrase is that you're not supposed to know what vehicle "my" Grandfather was in charge of, except that he had passengers ... plural. And they were in terror. Not that he was in his car, or that it was into a river. Nor was he a pilot of an aeroplane on his way to Toronto (although I have my own thoughts that being in charge of a 'plane heading for a snowy mountain is how I like to think of it) but to leave that whole thing to your own imagination, and to let you, dear reader, think of your own worst scenario and use that for the context. At least that way it will be the worst situation you can think of, and thereby the most terrifying ordeal for the passengers. Says a lot about me, planes and mountains, huh?

But I digress. Notice that in my version of the quote, it has been credited to Jim Harkins? Who was he and did he really say that? And why am I writing this at all? Well in a fit of boredom recently I noticed yet another rendition of the quote and wondered how many variants there were out there. A quick Google (see link above) found a whole load, but what intrigued me more was the various "other" people this quote was attributed to - who the hell are they to be using "my" quote without the "proper" credit? It appears, with a quick trawl of Google Groups, that these are no more than other Usenet posters who also used the quote in their .sig, but simply got credited with it. It also appears that they were using it long after me, but as I said above, I'm not claiming ownership to it anyway.

So who was Jim Harkins and why did I credit him? Well, it goes back to the point where I left work to go to University and had a short break in posting to Usenet. On my return I need a funny quote, so I stole on from somebody else. That person was indeed Jim Harkins, a guy who still exists in Usenet land today, but at the time was inhabiting the rec.games.pinball group, and this is where I saw it, sans attribute of it's own, so I just put Jim's name on it when I used it myself.

The earliet post I could find of Jim's with the quote is from 4th March 1993 and again this sounds about right, although Google may not have a full archive. There are certainly posts from Jim much earlier than that, but using a different .sig, so we'll assume this is his earliest use. There are no other Google records for the phrase before this, at least none that I can find, so we'll assume that Jim was indeed the internet/usenet source for this particular quote. Well done Jim!

So who originated this quote? Who knows. I'm sure it wasn't Jim himself, and he may well have "stolen" it from elsewhere. I'm pretty sure that I had heard the phrase before on a TV show, and my fuzzy memory tells me it was probably Emo Phillips appearing on a show such as Friday Night Live, the late-night comedy show which was the UK version of the US Saturday Night Live, back in the latter half of the 1980s.

However, while searching through Google, an interesting attribute for the quote came up - for one of my all-time favourite comedians and also a writer for many, many famous comedians all around the world - that of the late and very great Bob Monkhouse. Now I don't know if Bob was the originator, but thinking about this it certainly sounds like one of the very whitty short lines that he would put into either his own routines or write for someone else. At least I'm not the only one who thinks this is Bob's.

But for me, it will always be Jim Harkins.

Comments? Send me some email, or head back to Horrible.Demon.