A monumental misquote

I edited other people’s stuff for most of my working life, so I understand the importance of preserving meaning while trying to eliminate superfluous words. It was a pretty big deal. Even if the reporter was an idiot or the person quoted was a brainless blowhard (it happened), anything in quotation marks had to reflect precisely what the person said. You could screw around with story structure and grammar all you wanted, but when you got to the quote marks it was a good idea to get the reporter on the horn before turning to ellipses and excerpts.

And that was just for newsprint. If we’d known those words were going to be carved in granite, we’d have held the story for a day and made damned sure they were the right ones. A glance at Dr. Martin Luther King’s original words and what ended up on his monument proves why this is sound policy.

But the thing that bothers me most about this is why they went with the “drum major” quote at all. King was a gifted orator, and he said a lot better things than that in his short career. Any single sentence in his “I have a dream” speech would have been more inspirational. The image of a prancing drum major might work well with a Richard Simmons memorial — MLK not so much.

But there it is on the monument, awkward paraphrase and all. You just have to shake your head. That’s what I do when I see expensive signage with misspelled words. You can shell out thousands for the sign itself, but can’t part with a few bucks for a dictionary? A lot of copy editors are out of work these days, but I think it’s too soon to say that their skills are obsolete.