Earlier this year, speaking about the outrageous bonuses paid to AIG executives from taxpayer money, Representative Steven Latourette (R-Ohio), made this quip:
“Ross Perot, when he ran for president in 1992, he talked about the giant sucking sound. Well, today, there's another giant sucking sound going on in Washington, D.C., and that's the tightening of sphincters on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, as people are having to explain who put [the AIG bonuses] into the stimulus bill.”
Even if you don’t know who Ross Perot is or don’t know he coined the phrase “a giant sucking sound,” you’re probably familiar with it. It’s from “a famous quotation.”
So, what makes a quote “a famous quotation?”
It’s not just that it’s familiar to a lot of people at a certain period of time.
The great British quote maven, Nigel Rees
“Remember the dreadful example of the 1999 edition of the Oxford DQ, stuffing in remarks and supposedly quotable lyrics from the Spice Girls?” Rees wrote in his “Quote...Unquote” newsletter. “What a surprise that they have mostly gone from the most recent edition.”
In other words, many “quotes” have a short shelf life. They may be heard for a year or so, but they don’t have real longevity in our language and culture. Thus, they aren’t really “famous quotations.”
And, a quote is not necessarily a famous quotation just because it’s in quotation reference books.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
and other weighty quotation tomes include hundreds of quotes most people are not familiar with. These less familiar quotes may be worthy bits of wisdom or wit, or worth knowing for the purpose of cultural literacy. But they aren’t automatically “famous quotations” just because they’re in Bartlett’s and other quotation books.
My own working definition of a “famous quotation” is a quote that is both widely known and which has had, or is clearly likely to have, a long life in our language – by being cited, quoted, misquoted, mocked, recycled and/or repurposed on a fairly regular basis.
Like the phrase “a giant sucking sound.” It began it’s rise to quotation fame on October 15, 1992.
On that night, Independent candidate Ross Perot was in a televised presidential debate with Republican President George H. W. Bush and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton.
During the debate, Perot made this comment about NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement:
“If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay $1 an hour for your labor, have no health care, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care for anything but making money, then there will be a giant sucking sound going south.”
Perot’s entire sentence did not become famous, but the phrase “a giant sucking sound” certainly did and we still hear it used and repurposed today – on a fairly regular basis.
So, in my book, and my blog, Perot’s original use of it qualifies as “a famous quotation.”
Here are some of the other famous quotes and phrases linked to October 15:
• “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war.” - These words and the rest of the lyrics to the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” were written by British clergyman Sabine Baring-Gould and first published in the Church Times on October 15, 1864. The music was composed later by British composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, and first published with the lyrics in 1871.
• “It keeps going, and going, and going . . .” - The famous ad slogan for the “Energizer bunny” battery ads. The bunny and slogan first appeared together in a TV ad aired during the second game of the 1989 World Series, on October 15, 1989.
