1227. This week, we talk to Eli Burnstein, author of "Phrased & Confused." We look at why Robert Frost's "road less traveled" wasn't really less traveled, and why the other half of Stewart Brand's "information wants to be free" will make you think about it differently. Then we look at why "Hell is other people" isn't about crowds and how "Don't mess with Texas" began as an anti-littering campaign.
1227. This week, we talk to Eli Burnstein, author of "Phrased & Confused." We look at why Robert Frost's "road less traveled" wasn't really less traveled, and why the other half of Stewart Brand's "information wants to be free" will make you think about it differently. Then we look at why "Hell is other people" isn't about crowds and how "Don't mess with Texas" began as an anti-littering campaign.
Find Eli at eliburnstein.com.
A hearty thank you to the Keepers of the Commas and one Immortal on Patreon. We appreciate your support!
🔗 Share your familect recording in Speakpipe or by leaving a voicemail at 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Find an edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription.
Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Eli Burnstein. He's going to tell us that Robert Frost wasn't really recommending the road less traveled, Marie Antoinette didn't actually say "Let them eat cake," and "Don't mess with Texas" wasn't an aggressive state motto. Eli's new book, "Phrased and Confused," looks at what happens to famous quotations after they leave their original contexts. Eli, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Eli Burnstein: Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Mignon Fogarty: So what made you want to write a book about quotations people think they really understand but might not?
Eli Burnstein: Well, I've always collected quotes that I loved, and I think over time I discovered that the ones I liked best were, paradoxically, the ones I understood the least. So suddenly I had a list within the list of quotes that I wanted to learn more about. And kind of in tandem with that, I started noticing this second class of confusable quotes, which is quotes that we just plain get wrong. So there are ones we don't get that well at all, or at least ones I don't get that well at all, and then there are ones that are commonly misunderstood. And I thought it would be fun to explore both types of quote in a book kind of devoted to this concept of confusion.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, it's really fascinating. And the book also has lots of wonderful illustrations. Talk briefly how you worked with the illustrator—I want to make sure I'm saying her name right—Liana Finck? Finck?
Eli Burnstein: That's right. That's right, Liana Finck. Yeah, so she and I collaborated on my first book as well. She's been wonderful to work with, and I wanted to work with Liana just because she's got such a powerful and original imagination. Basically, the brief was, "Read the entry and do your thing," and she really did not disappoint. I mean, every time, I think, it really complements the text. As I note in my introduction, I think that she simultaneously manages to lighten up the text a little bit, but also add a bit of depth, because she takes you to a place that words cannot go, and I think that she does so superbly.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I have a favorite that I'll mention later. If you have one as we're going through, feel free to call it out and we can grab it and show it on the video.
Eli Burnstein: Ooh, I do have some favorites, yes.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, good, good. Okay, so let's get into the phrases. So the first one that is on my list is "I think, therefore I am." I mean, how do people misunderstand that?
Eli Burnstein: So that's an example of a quote that isn't misunderstood so much as not very well understood at all. And that is a shame because it is a quote that in over 2,000 years of philosophy is arguably considered or widely regarded as the most famous and perhaps the most important. So that's a pretty impressive feat for two millennia of philosophers scribbling away. As for what it means and why it's important, well, what it means strictly speaking is this figure, René Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician in the 1600s, was trying to establish a kind of stronger foundation for knowledge than the senses. Right? What we see and what we hear we're often wrong about, and he was concerned about this, that we cannot really build knowledge if we don't have strong foundations, and if we're wrong about what our eyes tell us, then how could we have certainty? And so he kind of engaged in this exercise where he would begin to doubt everything that he was capable of doubting, so that if something could be wrong, let's just assume that it is wrong, because between optical illusions or tricks of distance or false memories or dreams, we're tricked all the time into thinking things are real that aren't. So he says, "Let's just throw all of it out the window and see what's left." And through this exercise of what is sometimes called radical doubt, he came to this foundation where he said, "Well, the one thing that I cannot doubt is the very fact that I'm doubting." It's a very simple insight, but in order to throw all this stuff out the window, what your eyes see, what your ears hear, you must somehow be there to do the doubting, or as he kind of famously summarized it, "I think, therefore I am," or in Latin, cogito, ergo sum, right? So long as I'm engaging in the practice of wondering about whether or not something is real, or doubting, I must somehow be there to do that. And although it is a simple insight, it is really an important concept because it really captures the spirit of the modern times. So it's considered emblematic of the end of medieval thinking and the beginning of modern thinking, because instead of just looking around and saying, "Oh, look, the sun, it rises and it goes over our heads and it disappears at night, the sun must be orbiting the earth," suddenly he says, "No, we can't just take in what our senses tell us wholesale. We need to use our minds, we need to use our reason and subject everything that we see to this new principle of rational scrutiny." So it's an extremely important line and marks a real turning point in the history of philosophy and science and mathematics.
Mignon Fogarty: One of the things, it made me think of the current debate over whether AI is conscious or not, and I think the most interesting thing about that debate for me has been learning how much philosophers over the hundreds, thousands of years have disagreed about what it means to be conscious. Like they don't even all agree. I mean, not even close to agreeing!
Eli Burnstein: No, that's right. That this seems to be a debate that's raging. I'm seeing the headlines as well, and I am no expert in the subject of whether or not AI can think, but I think Descartes I don't think would be sympathetic to the idea that AI can think, but I probably shouldn't say too much more about that subject because it has been debated by those who know far more than I do about it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that's fine. I've just been seeing the philosophical statements like "I think, therefore I am" so much more often in the news than I ever used to, so it was a really relevant one to have in your book. And also, you pointed out that his Cartesian math system, the axes that we use in math, sort of relate—I mean, they're kind of connected to his philosophical thinkings, too.
Eli Burnstein: That's right. In addition to kind of coining the famous phrase "I think, therefore I am," Descartes, René Descartes is known for inventing or these pioneering what is called the Cartesian coordinate system, which as all of us will remember from grade school, it's where there's an x-axis and a y-axis, and we have to plot points using numbers. And so he and another fellow named Pierre de Fermat are credited with kind of pioneering this way of basically mathematizing space, and it was a major step forward in the history of mathematics and kind of paved the way for the invention of calculus by figures like Isaac Newton and Leibniz about a century later, or a generation later. And to your point, Mignon, it really is continuous with his idea "I think, therefore I am"—the idea that we don't just trust our senses blindly, but basically subject the visual world to reason, right? And what else is the subjection of the visual world to reason but an x-y coordinate system, right? That is kind of the mathematization of space that he had in mind. And a fun fact: the reason it's called a Cartesian coordinate system is because Descartes signed his name often in Latin, Cartesius. So his name is kind of hidden in the title.
Mignon Fogarty: It made me wonder, does cartography, the word for making maps, come from his name, too?
Eli Burnstein: That is a good question. I don't think it does, but I would imagine both of them do share an etymology having to do with paper.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, fascinating. So another phrase in your book was "ghost in the machine," and I felt like that was a pretty logical extension from "I think, therefore I am." There's some interesting parallels between them.
Eli Burnstein: Oh, I love that you're seeing these connections because, yeah, the book is, as you've noted, kind of in no particular order, and that's by design, ironically, which is I wanted people to kind of jump around from era to era, figure to figure, discipline to discipline. So there's poetry, literature, a little bit of science, history, and the line "ghost in the machine" is probably much further along than the one "I think, therefore I am," but they definitely kind of speak to one another. So "the ghost in the machine," listeners may be a little bit less familiar with this one, but it is a somewhat well-known phrase that has entered the lexicon, probably also in the context of debates about whether AI is conscious, but it is also the title of a novel, I believe there's a film about AI called "The Ghost in the Machine," it was the studio album, I believe the fourth studio album by the rock band The Police. So it is a phrase that is definitely in circulation, and it comes from a 20th-century philosopher named Gilbert Ryle, who was basically—he was basically the anti-Descartes. He was, you know, if Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," and that kind of established the human being as a mind that is somehow separate from the body, Gilbert Ryle basically says, "Well, that's a wild and problematic idea," and he kind of caricatured this idea with the expression "the ghost in the machine," because the ghost would be the mind, and the machine would be the body. And I think we should pause, we language lovers should pause to appreciate kind of the colorful language he's using here, because what could be more different than a ghost in a machine? So it's kind of a poetic image to come from an otherwise stuffy, elbow-patched philosophy professor from Oxford writing in the '50s, but I think it's a great image. And really he is trying to caricature this idea that the mind and the body are separate. And it's a very interesting debate because he or rather, it's a very interesting subject because he basically shows that, if we begin from a point of mind-body dualism, as the philosophers called it, we can really never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. You can never bridge that gap because how do you connect mental and physical phenomena, you know, if the thing that connects them could be neither mental nor physical? So you're ultimately in a bit of a difficult situation philosophically. He also talks about the different what's sometimes called "the problem of other minds," which is that if we begin from a place of mind-body dualism, then we can never really be sure what other people are thinking or even if they're thinking at all. And to go back to the AI stuff, I mean, it basically puts us in a position where, you know, we don't know whether AI is conscious, we don't even know if other people are conscious, because we only see their bodies, we only see their expressions, and according to mind-body dualists, we can never know their minds, and so we can never even know if they have one. And so Gilbert Ryle, by using this kind of cartoonish image of "the ghost in the machine," is trying to say that all of that is a silly way to start. And we could go on and on about it, but I assume we'll want to go beyond—I could talk about philosophy forever, but I'm sure there are lots of quotes we should explore.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, yeah, and that's why it reminded me of Descartes, right? Because he would doubt that other people are thinking, and that would be, you know, one of his doubts. So, yeah, it was fascinating. I've only heard "ghost in the machine" in the context of computers, so I thought it was fascinating that it was much older than I realized.
Eli Burnstein: That's right, and it's kind of great that it's taken on this meaning, or at least entered a culture where it really fits, but yes, it has this kind of more academic origin.
Mignon Fogarty: I was like, "What? It's about the soul? Okay!" So let’s go onto… Gertrude Stein, also, I had no idea she gave us so many well-known phrases. So, you know, she had given us "there's no there there," and she came up with the label for the "lost generation." But the line in your book that you dig into is "A rose is a rose is a rose." So what was she doing with that, and why do we maybe misunderstand it?
Eli Burnstein: Yeah, so that's a tough one, but also a really fun one, and hopefully one that I think we language lovers and hopefully the listeners out there will really enjoy, too, because Gertrude Stein was a poet and a very kind of formally inventive one. And with the line "A rose is a rose is a rose," well, I should qualify what I'm about to say because now we're dealing with poetry, and poetry means a lot, and we don't want to pin it down, we don't want to squeeze it too tightly and say definitively that it means this and not that, because poetry has so many connotations and can take you in so many directions. But, with that disclaimer aside, many people, myself included, take Gertrude Stein to be making a comment about the power of language to signify, and also the failure of language in this power to signify. And specifically, I think she's offering a reflection upon cliché. So when you take a word like "rose," which arguably in the history of English poetry and literature is one of the most used, arguably overused images, right? It is "my love is a rose," it has been used so much that it's considered trite or clichéd or stale. And so she's interested in the ability of language to grow stale with overuse, and paradoxically she is kind of using it—she's repeating it and kind of hitting you over the head with it to basically bring it back to life. So she even boasted that, "In my line, the rose is red, the color red for the first time in English poetry in a hundred years." But really, she's trying to say that back in the day poets could keep it very simple, they could talk about the moon or the sea and we would we would see it, but if if if we're trying to paint a picture with words, we need to be aware of the fact that words can stale over time, their ability to signify. And so it is a reminder and an encouragement, I think, to we writers, whether we're poets or or writers of another kind, it's an encouragement to we writers to always aim to keep our language vivid and fresh and alive.
Mignon Fogarty: And we're going to talk a little bit more about interpreting poetry a little bit later. But the next one is "the road less traveled" by Robert Frost, and I think, you know, most people think it has a specific meaning, and you're saying, well, if you look earlier in the poem, you know, maybe it doesn't.
Eli Burnstein: That's right. So this, now we're really getting to the territory of commonly misunderstood quotes. So "the road less traveled" is this well-known quote from a poem by Robert Frost called "The Road Not Taken." The line is, "I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." And it is everywhere in popular American culture. It has been used in car commercials, it is used in graduation speeches, you really see it all over the place. And it is used as emblematic of a spirit of nonconformism, of going your own way, of striking out on your own, exactly, of doing your own thing. And that is a noble sentiment, but alas, it is not the sentiment that is in the poem, and so it is a widely misunderstood quotation.
If you go back earlier in the poem, the narrator explicitly says that the two roads had been worn "really about the same," and also "that they equally lay in leaves." So, far from one road being less traveled than the other, they were equally well traveled. So then what's going on? How is it that this narrator then comes to this famous line? And the clue is in the line right before the famous one. He says, "I shall be telling this with a sigh / Ages and ages hence:" that "I took the road less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." "I shall be telling this" that I took the road less traveled by, not that I actually did. And so that ultimately changes the meaning of the poem completely. It is not about this maverick, "go your own way"-ism, it is all about how we make meaning after the fact out of seemingly arbitrary choices in life, and ultimately how we kind of turn our lives into a bit of a story, how we edit the history and how we narrativize our lives, so that there's some sort of linearity to it, some sort of purpose to it, and ultimately it is a kind of reflection on how we make sense of our lives, how we withstand the the the pain or the wonder of kind of what might have been, because with every decision we make, there's always that, "Well, what if I made the other decision?" And so we have to kind of explain it all away, lest we succumb to that feeling of the grass is greener that we are sometimes liable to feel. So it's really an expression or an exploration of our finitude, you know, we can't do it all, and it is a very deep poem still, but it is not quite the heroic or romantic one that many of us have been led to believe. And many people even think that Robert Frost did this on purpose, that he was known as a bit of a mischievous poet or a trickster, and, although it is widely misread, I think we could all be forgiven for misreading it because some people think he was playing a bit of a trick on us.
Mignon Fogarty: I mean, a creative speaker could make something out of that for a graduation speech as well. I mean, it's also a very, you know, inspiring story.
Eli Burnstein: Totally, and, as with Gertrude Stein, you know, you can make a lot of meaning out of a poem, and I don't want to over-explain it or say that, you know, it just means this one thing. For instance, there's even a bit of an irony that, on the one hand the poem is, you know, it's not about going your own way, and yet if we turn our own lives into a kind of story, that is us going our own way. So it kind of comes full circle and, you know, it says, "Well, if we're kind of shaping our lives into this narrative, what is that but going out on our own and taking the road less traveled?" And I think an interesting way of looking at it is even in the title, right? The title is "The Road Not Taken." And in the popular interpretation, the meaning is it's the road less traveled, it's the road that hasn't been taken before, but I am going to take it. But in the kind of closer and more careful reading, it's literally the road not taken. It's a poem about the roads we don't take in life and how we deal with those psychologically.
Mignon Fogarty: I loved the story about the literal, supposedly, inspiration for the poem.
Eli Burnstein: That's right. There's an anecdote about Robert Frost having spent time a few years in England before moving back to America when he wrote the poem. And, again, another irony because this poem is often taken to be kind of emblematic of this American spirit. But he wrote it in England, and many people think the poem… Sorry, he wrote it in America, but about his time in England, because when he lived there he he struck up a friendship with the English poet Edward Thomas, and apparently the two of them would often go on these country walks, and Edward Thomas was apparently rather indecisive about which route to take, you know, they're wandering through the woods and over the hills and there are all these kind of forking paths, and he goes, "Oh, should we go this way, should we go that way?" And, you know, he would often have regret that they hadn't gone the other way. So many people think, and then when Robert Frost moved back to America, he soon wrote the poem and sent it to Edward Thomas, and many people think of it as kind of a playful dig at his friend's indecisiveness. And so it's got this local origin story about simply being about indecisiveness and regret and, as I said, finitude, as, you know, the fancy word of our inability to do it all, and then, you know, it just ballooned into being one of the one of the most famous American poems of all time.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, the next one is "Good artists borrow, and great artists steal." And I have to say in my mind this is most closely associated with Austin Kleon. Austin Kleon, his book, "Steal Like an Artist," you know, was, you know, obviously very popular, and so I think of it with that, but it actually comes from T.S. Eliot.
Eli Burnstein: That's right, and how fitting that he should have pinched it from another author! And not not to be pointing any fingers at Austin Kleon, because T.S. Eliot himself, as I note at the end of the entry, kind of took this idea from other writers, too. It's in the introduction to a book by Tristram Shandy, and there's a fellow, a book critic, who talks about the poet Tennyson and uses similar language, and all of that was well before T.S. Eliot kind of immortalized the line. And the version of the line that he wrote was, "Good poets imitate, great poets steal," and it's kind of been broadened and smoothed out to the the line "Good artists borrow, great artists steal," and I think I think the same idea—the idea remains intact, but strictly speaking, T.S. Eliot was speaking about poets. But ultimately, yes, so it comes from this essay where T.S. Eliot is reflecting upon the fact that as writers, we don't live in a vacuum. We are always drawing on a tradition which came before us, and no less a writer than Shakespeare, you know, took nearly all of his plots from writers who came before him. And no one faults Shakespeare for that. The point is not to be original from top to bottom, it's to make it your own. And that is really where the distinction between borrowing and theft or or imitation and theft really comes. And, you know, there are everyday expressions where we kind of, you know, honor this idea. We talk about, you know, "paling in comparison," or "a fresh take," right? You know, we'll watch a movie and, you know, it could be the same story that's been told a hundred times before. It could literally be a reboot, you know, "Wuthering Heights" or "The Odyssey," you know, these are the kind of big big films of this last, you know, of the summer and fall. But, you know, what matters is not whether the story hasn't been told before, it's how alive the story is, you know, how much you've made it your own. And, you know, T.S. Eliot gets into detail about what that is, but I think in a nutshell it's painstaking craftsmanship. It's not just kind of unconsciously inheriting all this all these storylines and character types and turns of phrase, all these clichés, and just kind of, you know, lazily borrowing them to kind of tell your story, but to be really thoughtful about kind of welding it into what he calls what he calls a whole of feeling. So I think you have to kind of have this vision and painstakingly try to recreate it on the page. You know, I'm sure many of your listeners are writers, and, you know, we're all familiar with the struggle, the joys, but also the struggle of writing, and I think that we're all trying to get that kind of fresh, alive quality in our writing. And all he's saying is that it's naive to think that we're not living within a tradition. In fact, we borrow the tradition, but we bend it to our own purposes.
Mignon Fogarty: I was thinking about this, too, when we were talking about Gertrude Stein and her many successful phrases, and, you know, what is it that makes a phrase stick and last, you know, in the public consciousness for decades or hundreds of years? And in a lot of ways it's the packaging. It's the writing, you know, that the ideas aren't necessarily new, but like the way they're phrased is what makes them really stick.
Eli Burnstein: Totally. It's the ability to bring old ideas to life, you know. And these are complex, big philosophical things, you know, there's the famous line, "There's nothing new under the sun," but then there's also, you know, I want to say it was Ezra Pound who said, "Make it new," as a kind of poetic credo. So there's a tension in writing between kind of originality and kind of the impossibility of originality. And ultimately like so many artistic truths, both are true, right? That kind of live in this tension between kind of recreation, or imitation and being original. And I think that T.S. Eliot is very aware of this tension and wants us to say, "You don't have to kind of be so radically different, you just have to kind of make it your own."
Mignon Fogarty: Our next one is one that I know frustrates a lot of people or confuses them, and it's "The exception proves the rule." Like, what does that mean even?
Eli Burnstein: Yeah, so "The exception proves the rule," this is another one that's kind of widely, you know, it's misunderstood and not very well understood. So, you know, it's arguably one of these phrases that's just so counterintuitive, because when you hear a line like that, you think, or when you hear this line, you think, "Well, no, an exception disproves the rule, doesn't it?" And a few different theories have been offered as to kind of the origin of this expression, but ultimately it derives from actually a legal principle that sounds very fancy, but it's ultimately not that complicated. It basically means that where an exception has been made, you can infer the existence of a rule to which it is the exception. So a simpler translation, to be honest, would be "The exception presupposes the rule." So one of the examples I use in this chapter is a street sign that says "No parking 5 to 7." You can infer with more or less certainty that the rest of the time it's okay to park there, right? So the exception presupposes and thereby proves the existence of a rule that opposes it. Other examples would be, you know, signs that say "Designated smoking area"—the implication is that the rest of, you know, elsewhere you got to you got you can't smoke; or "Deliveries go to side entrance"—again, it suggests that the rule is everybody else can go through this door, and on and on. So it's ultimately a kind of simple legal principle that has taken on looser meanings in everyday speech, but a kind of fun historical footnote is that in my research I came across what's sometimes or widely regarded as the first instance of this argument being made, and it goes all the way back to Cicero, the philosopher and lawyer of ancient Rome, who uses this argument to defend his client against the charges of taking a Roman citizenship illegally. So the people of the town that he's from in Spain say, "There are other peoples that are not allowed to become citizens, so, you know, people of Spain should not be allowed to become Roman citizens either." And Cicero says, "Actually, we have explicit rules that specify that these other peoples cannot be citizens, so those are exceptions. So where no exception has been made, we can actually infer the opposite. There's no rule that says, you know, people from Spain can't become Roman citizens, so my client is totally fine." It's pretty abstract and, you know, we don't need to get too far into the legal weeds on this one, but, but yeah, it's a widely misunderstood phrase, but ultimately its meaning is rather simple.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it finally makes sense when you think of it that way. Here's another one that I have often struggled with, what does this mean, is "The medium is the message." Well, what does that mean? Are we saying like TikTok is the message, and the videos themselves aren't? Like help me understand that one.
Eli Burnstein: Totally. So this is another one of these big, kind of enigmatic philosophical phrases. It comes from the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who wrote this in the '60s in a book called "Understanding Media," which was really influential, and has proven to be a very prophetic book, but also quote, because he's reflecting upon the way that media, whether it's TV or the radio, or smartphones, headphones, posters, take your pick, they aren't just neutral envelopes for the contents they deliver, but affect the way we perceive those contents, and even more profoundly, reshape society. You know, the invention of the novel, for instance, suddenly kind of took us from the world of the stage, which was a very collective experience, and kind of drove us inward and made us have these kind of deep relationships with ourselves; or the radio had the opposite effect, suddenly we would gather around and listen to things together; and McLuhan is is kind of reflecting upon the power of these technologies to reshape society, and we don't need to look around too hard to see how prophetic an observation that is, you know, social media being the big one of the last couple decades, and AI, as many people suspect, is kind of the the next big paradigm shift to come. But just in the in the case of social media, many people kind of credit it, but also fault it for, you know, expanding our social networks, aggravating our FOMO, arguably increasing sense of isolation, splitting us off into filter bubbles or echo chambers because of kind of the way content is sent, you know, is personalized to us through algorithms, and on and on. So, you know, these are not neutral or inert technologies, but ultimately reshape the way we relate to one another and to ourselves. And the reason, you know, he didn't just say, "The medium is more important than the message," I think is because ultimately McLuhan is saying something about the importance of the artist, not to always bring it back to those writers who are listening, but I think he's trying to say that, you know, the artist is the person who is really tasked with paying attention to how their senses are changing, you know, how the world is changing and how the world is changing in even the literal sense of how it affects their perceptions. And artists, whether you're a painter or a filmmaker or a novelist, are trying to capture the truth of the world now and kind of show us, you know, how we look in our mirror, and I think that they are trying to capture a lot of these subtle changes that McLuhan claims are kind of being ushered in by changes in technology.
Mignon Fogarty: I mean, what do you think he'd say about podcasting as a medium?
Eli Burnstein: Oh, great question! I mean, I think that, you know, it is simultaneously, you know, like the radio, it is an auditory form, but unlike, you know, the kind of early days of the radio where where people kind of do it as a collective experience, I imagine that the the predominant experience of listening to podcasts is solitary, and that's neither that's not a bad thing at all, but it probably, not unlike a novel, has kind of an inwardizing effect that you are kind of spending time with yourself, but at the same time with another, you know, people talk about parasocial relationships, you often as a listener kind of imagine yourself as part of the conversation. That's certainly how I feel when I listen. But, you know, he wasn't just interested in the, kind of the qualities of the medium kind of inwardly, but also outwardly. So I think McLuhan would be interested, for instance, in kind of the prevalence of headphones, you know, as people commute to work, or do the dishes, or, you know, walk down the street. If they've got headphones in their ears and they're listening to a podcast or music, you know, and these will have different effects on us, it probably changes the nature of street life, you know, maybe there are fewer chance encounters. On the other hand, you know, the rate at which we're absorbing information is probably much higher or kind of being given food for thought or kind of expanding our minds with kind of, yeah, new insights and new information. So, you know, these things are often a mixed bag. I don't think he was just a skeptic about new media, but but that we should always be aware, try as best as we can to be aware of how these technologies are kind of reshaping society and and to try and, you know, consume art in an effort to better understand how it is changing us.
Mignon Fogarty: So interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think about like so much of the short-form content forces us to simplify things and maybe, you know, dumb them down or make things seem really black and white, and, you know, a longer medium, medium like podcasting, you know, lets us explore things more in depth.
Eli Burnstein: I think that's a perfect example, you're right. Take a look at the tweet, and what many kinds of fault Twitter and other social, written social media for doing is kind of exacerbating, you know, simplifying and by extension kind of worsening the quality of debate online, kind of stripping away the nuance that makes for a robust conversation. And podcasts arguably kind of create a space where a lot of that can come back.
Mignon Fogarty: I mean, I enjoy short-form media as much as the next person.
Eli Burnstein: Well, same. I mean, I love a one-liner as should be obvious from this book! But but but and I think that's, you know, it's perhaps, you know, trite to say, but, you know, I think with each new technology, there is good and bad, and we need to be, you know, take stock of these. We we don't want to go in blind and just fall under the spell of whatever new screen or or or or device kind of is on the scene, but we also don't want to just, you know, bury our heads in the sand and pretend like it's not there or doesn't come with some advantages. You know, I've used ChatGPT. I'm not saying other people have to, but I find it fruitful, fascinating. At the same time, I proceed with caution.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, another one that I felt followed very nicely from this is "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."
Eli Burnstein: Yeah, that one was another kind of big, bold, philosophical line from the American essayist Susan Sontag. So she wrote this kind of groundbreaking essay called "Against Interpretation." It is very thought-provoking because she is a theorist herself, and yet she is coming forward and saying, "You know, we need to be careful about the way we we critics and philosophers and and academics and book critics and writers of magazine articles, and by extension podcasters, too, I think, the way we talk about novels and film and painting and sculpture and theater and all the great art that's out there. We need to be careful about it because, you know, the more we kind of unravel a poem into prose, we have to be careful about losing something along the way, because the painting is more than just what it means. It's, you know, it's the splash of color itself, it's how it makes us feel." So, you know, she's saying that certain kind of strands of academia who want to kind of turn a painting into a kind of an allegory for some political theme, or kind of take it in a Freudian direction and say that it's a, you know, it's the unconscious, you know, it's the id speaking to the superego, or has religious themes, you know, we Susan Sontag wants to say, "Okay, let's not violate the work of art. Let's see it. Let's savor it. Let's feel it." And importantly, she's not rejecting, you know, she's kind of being polemical by saying, "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect," because she is actually pro-interpretation. Towards the end of her essay, she says the the goal is not to simply return to a state of reverential silence before the work of art, but to embrace a kind of interpretation or what we could call criticism or analysis that doesn't distort the work of art, but actually helps us see it better, right? So, you know, you read a great film review or a great essay about a novel or you hear a great podcast where people talking about their favorite favorite novel, you know, a good conversation around this thing or a good article brings it to life. I mean, I can't count the number of times that I've read a great essay about a novel that I loved, and it just made me love that novel even more. It made me see things I didn't realize were there or made me feel, see them more deeply. But then there are also articles out there that kind of force the novel through a theoretical framework, and suddenly the novel's been lost, and we're just kind of buried in mounds of theory and academia. So she's trying to get us back to kind of see the thing in the first place. Again, it's a very provocative essay, and I'd encourage people to read it for sure.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you think she'd say that the way people misunderstand "the road less traveled," that because it's inspired so many people to, you know, make the bold choice, that maybe we shouldn't dissuade them of that idea? Or is it okay to do both?
Eli Burnstein: That is a good question. You know, I would imagine she would celebrate kind of multiplicity of opinion on kind of reader response, right? That there isn't one interpretation of a poem. And, you know, I think she would probably still be sympathetic or she would probably appreciate that people are in some ways misreading it, but that they're misreading it for a reason, right? That that ultimately, you know, here's a line I didn't get into in the book, but there's a line I thought about including, which is the what's called "the death of the author" by the French philosopher Roland Barthes, which is a whole other kettle of fish, but I think, you know, in the spirit of that line, I think that once it enters the public domain, it means what people want it to mean, and we ultimately lose ownership over our words. There's kind of the original intention and then there's what you could call kind of semantic drift. It's going to grow, expand, change, occasionally suffer inversions where it means something quite different. Sometimes that's okay, because it takes on a new life. Sometimes it's not, you know, this is the kind of wild world of language, especially posthumously. So I think that she would be fine with that, but I think she would also caution against, as I said earlier, kind of squeezing a poem too tight.
Mignon Fogarty: Here's another one that I know why I think a lot of authors and and creators don't like, and also doesn't necessarily mean what it originally meant, at least from the person who said it, and that is, "Information wants to be free."
Eli Burnstein: "Information wants to be free." Yeah, that's another example of a line commonly misunderstood, and in this case it's commonly misunderstood because half of the quote has been chopped off. So its speaker, Stewart Brand, kind of famous technologist, technology writer, in the '80s said, "Information wants to be free, it also wants to be expensive." So that's a pretty big omission, because he was not encouraging either kind of internet piracy or freedom of information activists, although, you know, there are big groups who have kind of made that line their motto within these domains. He was making an observation about the kind of rapidly diminishing cost of information and the arguably increasing incentive to charge for it, or at least the persistent incentive to charge for it. And to make that a little more concrete, you know, if you look at the long history of of information in the broad sense, so, you know, you go from stone tablets to handwritten parchment to printed page and now to, you know, screens and emails and messages being sent in milliseconds, ultimately over the history of language it's become a lot cheaper, a lot faster to reproduce or send. You know, in the world of music, you know, music producers once had to kind of press their albums onto vinyl or CD polycarbonate, now it's an upload, it's a download, you know, the cost of information is rapidly approaching zero. At the same time, it has value for people, and that means there's an economic incentive to charge for it. So these two things live in a tension. He was kind of articulating this challenge that developers have, you know, if you create a piece of software, it could cost you. It was your creative work, and it took you time and energy, but it's pretty easy to steal it, and it's certainly easy to make a million copies of it. What do you do? So he wasn't, it was a descriptive comment rather than a prescriptive comment, let me say, you know, that these things live in a tension that has really characterized the digital age.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, well, I want to do sort of a speed run and then finish with my favorite one from the book. So this next few I think they're maybe they're like interesting tidbits about them. So the first one, "Let them eat cake." Marie Antoinette didn't say that, right?
Eli Burnstein: That's right, in a nutshell she didn't say it, it's an extremely famous phrase and it's evidence more or less of kind of propaganda that has persisted for about 200 years, that, you know, shortly after her death it was a line that was ascribed to her as kind of emblematic of this kind of haughty, aristocratic disregard for kind of the the plight of the common people. So it was used to kind of defame the aristocracy and in particular this unfortunate woman in the spirit of the Revolution, and ultimately this kind of misattribution has stuck for over 200 years.
Mignon Fogarty: And here's another woman who was misunderstood, "Well-behaved women seldom make history."
Eli Burnstein: Yeah, this is a great one that's commonly misunderstood. It was a huge line in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. It may be a little bit less well-known now, but it was really huge back in the day. It was on bumper stickers—
Mignon Fogarty: I still hear it all the time. Yeah.
Eli Burnstein: Okay, good, I'm I'm glad to hear that, because I yeah, it was it was huge in its day, and to your point, you know, you might still come across it on bumper stickers, T-shirts, it was a real slogan of of kind of second-wave feminism and kind of of women's liberation. And, yeah, the line is, "Well-behaved women seldom make history." One would think the meaning is pretty straightforward. You know, if well-behaved women seldom make history, you better go out and misbehave and make history. But in fact, what the author, the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, was saying in the dry academic article that it comes from was that well-behaved women seldom make history, but they should make history, they have been ignored by the field of history. So she is ultimately still saying something very much in the spirit of of women's liberation, and she also kind of performed the misbehavior by kind of doing something different in the field of history and was a real pioneer in the discipline of history and is credited with kind of helping historians learn to pay more attention to quote-unquote "ordinary people" and ordinary women, because the practice of history had been so concerned with the Napoleons and Churchills of the world, that as important as they are, we kind of forgot to look at everyday people, because they also tell us a lot about a historical period. So, she herself misbehaved and made history, but what she meant was that we need to pay more attention to people that we've been leaving out of history, and in particular women.
Mignon Fogarty: And then, "There are no second acts in American lives." You reminded us to think about how plays are constructed.
Eli Burnstein: That's right, this is a line from the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of "The Great Gatsby," and it is a line that you often read in newspapers, it is a kind of celebrity journalist line that people use because "there are no second acts in American lives" sounds like, "Oh, there's no comebacks," that, you know, if you if you're an actor and kind of fall into obscurity, you're not going to make a comeback, or if you're a politician and there's a scandal or whatever, you're not going to come back for a second election. But, and normally it's quoted in order to refute it, because America is the land of comebacks and second chances and all that, so people usually quote it to say, "Oh, how wrong Fitzgerald was." But if you read the quote in context, he did not mean that at all, and that is because importantly, to your point, Mignon, plays during this period did not have two acts, they had three acts. And when he said, "there are no second acts in American lives," he was not saying there's no second chances, but there's no middle acts, there's no difficulties, because the second act is always the conflict or complication in a narrative, and it's where all the hard stuff happens, where all the drama goes down, before you emerge victorious in the third act. And ultimately he was making a comment about the Roaring Twenties, because he lived in the '20s and '30s, and before the stock market crash of 1929, the 1920s in America were a time of great celebration and energy, and he was talking about how you could seemingly kind of skip over the hard part and tap dance straight to the bank. But, you know, to make it even more complicated, he says that line only in order to refute himself. He says, "I once thought there were no second acts in American lives. But in the 1930s, when I returned to New York and saw the kind of the waste and the sadness and the poverty, I realized I was wrong." So we've been twice misled. It didn't mean, it doesn't mean what we think it does, and he didn't mean it anyway, or he didn't agree with it anyway.
Mignon Fogarty: And here's one I certainly have said myself in an airport or two: "Hell is other people." But maybe I should be looking more inward?
Eli Burnstein: That's right. So, yes, it is commonly, this line comes from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and as you kind of rightly suggest, it is commonly interpreted as a simple kind of misanthropic gesture, that, you know, people are the worst, they're so annoying, I can't stand them, get me as far away from them as possible. But Sartre was actually saying something quite different, which is that, or let me put it this way, that would be the line "Other people are hell." What he said was, "Hell is other people." And what he means is there's no worse pain on Earth than social pain. So Sartre was an existentialist, and part of his kind of philosophical system had to do with the fact that the way we understand ourselves is intricately tied up in how others see us. So we see ourselves through others. And so if our relationships with others are bad, then our relationship with ourself is bad. And I think we all know what it's like to be in a fight with a partner or to be made to feel insecure, and it comes from his famous play "No Exit," where three, you know, fresh recruits to the afterlife are kind of seated in what looks like a waiting room, and they all have this faint sense that they've been sent to, you know, to hell, and they're awaiting their punishment, but ultimately the three of them kind of start needling at each other and and it eventually dawns on them that they're already in hell because they each kind of bring out the worst in each other, make them feel terrible about themselves, because they they each kind of see through each other. And so "Hell is other people," he's not making a blanket pessimistic statement about kind of society or or company, but that if my relationship with another person is bad, then it just, it hurts like nothing else can.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Okay, and let me end with my favorite. I love the story of this one: "Don't mess with Texas." How did that get started?
Eli Burnstein: Yeah, so "Don't mess with Texas" is kind of, again, commonly thought of as just a bit of, you know, fun Texas swagger. That's certainly what I thought, and I kind of loved it for that reason, but, you know, I did a little bit of research and found out that it is in fact from an anti-littering campaign, and there is a fun bit of wordplay going on there with the word "mess." So "Don't mess with Texas" is a sign that you will still see if you drive on the highways of the Lone Star State. Usually underneath it, it will say "Littering fine, $500," or something like that. But it was, there's a fun story behind this, which is that roadside littering was rampant in Texas, and it was costing taxpayers millions of dollars to clean it up. So the, I think the Texas Board of Transportation went to this ad agency, the ad agency proposed this line, and at first the board hesitated because it was pretty, you know, it was deemed kind of edgy, and but they went with it, and and it's a good thing they did, because it was an overwhelming success. And I think it again, you know, to the language listeners listening, I think it's a great example of the importance of tone of voice, right? Here here, you know, you could say "Don't litter" in a hundred different ways, but, you know, if if the audience is the type that wants to flout the law and doesn't care about signs that say "Pretty please," well then if you speak if you speak in their tone of voice, suddenly they feel heard, right? Suddenly the guy chucking his can of whatever out the window suddenly goes, "Yeah, don't mess with Texas," and they feel included, and suddenly they're they are a steward and custodian of the state rather than someone polluting it. So I think it's a kind of a stroke of advertising genius, and arguably is a victim of its own success, because the line is so well known, we forget where it comes from.
Mignon Fogarty: That's wonderful. Well, Eli Burnstein, thank you so much! The book is "Phrased and Confused." I loved it. You know, I expected to learn about all these phrases, but, I mean, I also didn't expect to learn as much about philosophy, which, you know, I've always kind of regretted not taking a philosophy class in college, and now I feel like I know a little bit more about it just from your book. It was delightful, and thank you so much for this conversation. Where can people find you?
Eli Burnstein: So they can find me at my website, eliburnstein.com, I'm on Substack and, you know, Twitter and all the rest, and my book is out wherever books are sold.
Mignon Fogarty: Again, the book is "Phrased and Confused," and we're here talking with Eli Burnstein. If you are a Grammarpaloozian, we're going to have a bonus conversation, too, so check in your feed for that. Thank you for your support. And for everyone else, that's all. Thanks for listening.