It won't surprise you to learn that I have a T-shirt with the Laurel Thatcher Ulrich quote, "Well-behaved women seldom make history."So, you can imagine my horror when I recently saw a bumper sticker announcing: "Women who behave rarely make history."
- It's fine to steal an idea and make it better, make it your own. It's not fine to steal someone else's words, make them worse and then sell them.
- "Well-behaved women" is a precise description. "Women who behave" is not. We all behave. Some of us just behave a tad more outrageously than others.
- Yes, I realize that taking a red pen to random bumper stickers is a sign that I've been a writer/editor for too long. It's a sickness. You gotta love me anyway.
3 comments:
Jan -
So assume for a moment, that a woman created the bumper sticker (or was perhaps the car's driver). She obviously misbehaved, in an outrageous manner arguably, by committing all the heinous infractions you list in the post. By doing so, she prompted an entire Creative Instigation blog post (a history making event by anyone's standards) about the original quote and its author.
Had she simply used the quote as originally stated and credited the author (well-behaved actions, no doubt), you might have noted it to yourself and not made another mention of it.
As one of my English teachers used to say, Q.E.D.
Just thinkin...
Mike
Now there's a creative response! (You all can see why Mike is one of the mainstays on my creative team. Different perspectives. It's a good thing.)
did you know there's a book, too?
http://www.amazon.com/Well-Behaved-Women-Seldom-Make-History/dp/1400041597
(I ought to read it sometime.)
:)
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