I'm Comin' to See Ya Elizabeth!

Or,

Just Kill Me Now

“Trust, but verify.”—Ronald Reagan, 40^th President of the United States

Because:

“People are morons”—Phil Connors, Groundhog Day

            Nobody knew how to turn a phrase like Gilbert Keith Chesterton.  The man is endlessly quotable.  Unfortunately—at least for someone trying to find a specific quote—he was also vastly prolific.  And so that’s how I found myself recently forced to use the internet in an attempt to at least narrow down my search for a quote I knew I had read in one of Chesterton’s many writings.

            At first, it seemed, all was well.  I punched in the basic quote, as well as I could remember it—which was quite well—and up popped several sources telling me where to find the quote.  Among the sources I found was a presentation of the quote on Facebook and one on Goodreads.  They all seemed to concur that the source of the quote was a book from 1930 called The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic.  So far, so good.

            I, of course, owned a copy of the book (after all, I was only trying to locate a quote I had already read, so it was logical that the relevant book should be somewhere on my shelves), so I retrieved my copy of Chesterton’s Collected Works volume III, which contains The Thing.  Now it was just a matter of finding a single short sentence in a 205-page book comprising 35 essays.  I doubted the internet could help me here.

            So I turned to my hardcopy of The Thing, ready to tackle the task of locating that quote somewhere therein.  As I began, I noted that this hardcopy gave the date of this book as 1929, not 1930—that was my first clue.  If these people could not get something so simple as this detail right, why trust them?  So, when a good bit of searching for the relevant quote—or at least a sufficiently familiar passage—turned up nothing, I returned to the web to try again.

            With a little effort, I finally located the quote on Google Books, or some similar service.  I paged back, hoping to find the beginning of the essay.  But lo, the language looks very familiar—I’m sure I’ve read this before—then I notice the title at the top of the page is “Why I Am a Catholic.”  Yet, in my copy of The Thing, the title on each page is of the essay I’m reading, not the book.  Then it hits me: just before The Thing in volume III is a short, six-page essay called simply “Why I Am a Catholic,” and the words I recognize online are—I recall it clearly now—the opening lines of that essay.

            Which brings me to my point: I cannot work like this!  No one cares about precision anymore.  The online sources I had consulted had all quoted Chesterton accurately, but they had all confused a short, six-page essay with an essay collection of a similar—but not identical—name.  Yet, not one of them had sought to be more specific, to specify which essay they were quoting, much less what page.  Most likely, none even knew the book was an anthology at all.

            And why should  it matter to them, anyway?  Who cares if they were slightly off about which book Chesterton said something in?  Well, I care.  When you send someone to the wrong book, it is like sending them to the wrong house.  I would rather that you just admit that you don’t know where a certain person—or a certain quote—lives than send me to the wrong place.  It is a matter of respect: respect for the source; respect for one’s audience; respect for the truth.  And let us not forget self-respect.  Remember that, folks?  Remember when people with college degrees had too much pride in their hard-earned education to let themselves say something in public that made them look like idiots?  Remember when people were not afraid to call someone on such error?  Even here in America, it was once so.  And as a college teacher, I do what I can to revive that sort of serious attitude about truth and accuracy. 

            Personally, I want to be able to back up the claims I make when writing with evidence, such as the proper reference for a source; that way, if my readers wish to verify what I claim, or explore such ideas further, they can do so, and they should be able to trust me to both tell them the truth, and be accurate about what I say.  If I can’t do that, how can I expect my students to take me seriously when I try to teach them how to properly source their papers?

            But this whole experience simply serves to once more illustrate my point: if you want anything remotely resembling the truth, you cannot just Google stuff.  People today are sloppy and imprecise, caring nothing for accuracy.  Now me, I enjoy the mildly philological challenge of figuring out the truth behind someone’s asinine misquotation (although I was disappointed to see such an error on Goodreads).  But I weep for the others; for my students and those too young to have ever had to do research using a hardcopy encyclopedia.  Those poor souls, unless someone should explain to them the way of the Lord more perfectly, will go on trusting Google, and the internet in general, as if they were a magic mirror they can simply inquire of in order to get information as trustworthy and accurate as that coming from the computer of the Enterprise-D (and yet, even that computer was notorious for not volunteering information, as even its own chief engineer testified); they don’t know that much of the more popular parts of the web (the parts that top a Google search list) is a cesspool of foolishness, misnomer, rumor, and misinformation.  And what they do not know will hurt them, because of all the things the internet will tell them that are not so.  

            So remember, children: you can’t just Google stuff.  Do not trust; always verify.  Because, people are idiots.