Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Could this be my ticket into the book of quotations?
Posted By Brandon Burt on September 30, 2009, 5:49 AM
As I was messing around on a news aggregation site I was surprised to discover that I was recently quoted! (Yeah, yeah, yeah -- laugh all you want. But I wasn't Googling myself; I was only testing out how the site worked. Really. Really, I was.)
In her August column about weird hysterics at town-hall meetings, columnist Nerissa Young wrote in the Beckley, W.V., Register-Herald: ---
Watching the news reports makes one inclined to agree with letter writer Brandon Burt in his 2005 correspondence to the Salt Lake City Weekly: “Nobody tests the limits of free expression more than idiots.”
Or maybe the late U.S. Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey summarized it best this way: “The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.”
Now, I never expected that anything I wrote would be included in the same stream of thought as a quote by Hubert Humphrey! So, that's an honor. Plus, it's flattering to be quoted in an out-of-state daily.
Still, I'm a little disconcerted to be identified as a "letter writer." Maybe my pride is bruised because Young's got so much journalism cred (she's a member of the SPJ's Project Watchdog committee, as well as a print-journalism professor at Shepherd University).
But, for whatever reason, I suddenly find myself motivated to make it very clear that the quote never appeared in the Letters section (not that there's anything wrong with the Letters section). It was from a column. A column, mind you!
Then, I remembered being very pleased when City Weekly music editor Jamie Gadette chose that very same sentence as one of 2005's best quotes for the "Year in Review" issue.
It seems that two very smart journalists decided, independently of each other, that they liked it. So now I'm starting to wonder if, several years ago, I might have stumbled upon a very good quote indeed. Hell, maybe it's the very best thing I ever wrote. If it really catches on, who knows where it all could lead?!?!
Since life today is apparently all about narcissistic self-promotion, I'm practically obligated to jump on this pony and ride it as far as it will get me.
Now, how exactly does one tout one's own familiar quotation? Does Bartlett's have a Twitter stream?
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