Tags
I feel a nagging sensation of guilt.
Coming up with a title for a post is hard. It’s made harder by WordPress because the nature of the interface* wants you to create the title first before doing any actual writing. That’s a lot of pressure.
One way around it all is, rather than come up with a unique, creative, and informative headline I can, instead, think of some famous quote – from literature, from a movie, or (especially) from a song – that meshes well with my subject matter. If I twist a bit of pun or double entendre out of the title, I swell with the pride that comes with creative contribution. This, even though I am simply using someone else’s words.
Worse yet, the more posts I write the more I seem prone to falling back on this particular crutch.
The guilt flows from the fact that I generally do this without citing my source. In fact, the context is often that the quote isn’t even in “quotes.” I rely on you, the reader, to recognize the familiarity of the line and then to puzzle out for yourself from whence you heard it in the first place. I picked this up from social media where sourcing** a quote is a mere swipe, copy, and paste away. Realizing I was toying with not only common decency and propriety but, perhaps, the law, I figured I’d at least put a reference to the author or source into WordPress’ Tags to let everyone know I was borrowing. Most of the time.
But does that go far enough? Is my laziness so great that it would prevent me from going any farther?
The joy I felt in creating my two musical timelines (1968 and 1984-85) inspired me to do the same for all my unattributed (and in many cases attributed, I suppose, where I have done so) quotes from whenever they’ve been taken. Obviously I don’t want to recreate those “songs of…” timelines wherein they already exist. Nor would it be fruitful to construct full cultural timelines starting from centuries before I was born up until the present. Instead, my goal is to fill out the entirety of recorded history only to the extent that I have referenced particular works obscurely through titles, subtitles, and captions.
This is still not doing quite what the subject merits as you, the reader, can only “reverse lookup” the attributions now. It doesn’t exactly acknowledge my sources in a way such that my 9th grade English teacher would approve. Nonetheless, if quote stealing is good enough for the President of the United States then I don’t think I should feel too bad about doing it myself.
I’ll begin my new timeline with Sun Tsu’s Art of War. The 2,500-year-old work is probably quoted far more often than it has been read. I myself, despite being able to see a copy of the book from where I sit at my computer, have yet to have read more than a few brief sections. It’s embarrassing, but I’ll admit it here to you guys. The fact is, it’s more accurate to say that I am quoting the likes of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street than I am referencing the ancient Chinese sage. In any case, I’ve got nothing else anywhere near that old, so this is where my timeline starts (you might also want to jump in near the end and work backwards).
I should say “nothing else” unless, of course, you catch me quoting from the oldest passages of the Bible. When were the various books of the Bible written? I’m going to just avoid the question and shoehorn all biblical references, ancient and considerably less so, into an entry for the King James Bible. Despite a Catholic upbringing (which eschewed said version), its style strikes my ear as the proper language when making a biblical reference. For this particular source, I want to apologize in advance for a lack of a direct match for my quotations. When I make use of biblical verse, I tend to mix and match to get the best language from half-a-dozen popular translations. If inaccurate attribution puts my mortal soul in peril, that is on me.
Note that in between Sun Tzu and the proliferation of literature in the Victorian era, I’ve still got plenty of material quoted that is not biblical. The thing is, I’ve already included in my Age of Discovery timeline, starting with The Bard, a dedicated section for literature and music. Likewise, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and other great writers of Rome have been quoted within my Late Rome timeline. This continues through the Enlightenment and the foundational documents of modern science and government. No need to duplicate references when I’ve been placing these writers into the context of their times all along.
Because I’ve gone so overboard in referencing obscure lyrics, and because the timeline tool runs into problems when displaying large pictures or long videos, I’m going to divide my timeline into episodic stretches which I will release to you piecemeal. It is much like the new Netflix strategy to counter binge-watching, which apparently is detrimental*** to Netflix’s business model. Today you get a link to a timeline that runs only up until that 1968 annus horribilis. From there, you’ll be forced to wait for new episodes to come out on my schedule.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/pexels-photo-934067.jpeg)
*I have this vague recollection of a many-years-out-of-date version wherein an untitled draft post would get lost, under certain circumstances, within the UI that allowed the revisiting of started, but unfinished, articles. I doubt it happens now and it may even be doubtful whether it happened then. Nonetheless, after losing track of some of what I was writing, I decided that it was necessary to always have at least a working title when composing a new post.
**On Facebook and the like, the presence of quotation marks and a citation grants no authority whatsoever. It would seem prudent that any citation that you aren’t already familiar with (and about which you give a rat’s ass) should get the quick internet search just to check. Especially before sharing or reposting.
***Not to hijack my own train-of-thought, but whatever Netflix’s marketing people (or Amazon’s, Apple’s, Disney’s, etc) say about the decision to stop releasing “series” by season, the motivation is entirely financial. Streaming service consumers have learned that, given a show they want to see, they can simply subscribe for a month (or whatever the minimum trial period may be), watch the show all at once, and then drop their subscription. If episodes are dribbled out in drabs, this strategy is less effective. I have no such ulterior motive.