“The shot heard round the world.”

 

THE ORIGINAL THING HEARD ROUND THE WORLD: “The shot heard round the world.”        Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)        American poet, essayist and lecturer        This famous line is from Emerson’s poem commonly called the “Concord Hymn.” (Full title: ““Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument.”)It’s the last line of the first verse:               “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,                Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,                Here once the embattled farmers stood                And fired the shot heard round the world.”        Emerson wrote the poem in 1836 for a ceremony to celebrate the completion of a monument to the American “Minutemen” who fought at the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. These skirmishes between rebellious Americans and British troops on April 19, 1775 are generally regarded as the beginning of the Revolutionary War.        That morning, some 700 British Army regulars were marching through Lexington toward Concord to confiscate an illegal weapons arsenal stored there by the Massachusetts militia. When the “Redcoats” got to Lexington, their way was blocked by about 80 local militiamen. British Major John Pitcairn ordered the Americans to disperse, which they actually began to do. Then, suddenly, someone fired a shot. Nobody knew who it was. But, when it rang out, both sides started firing at each other and the American Revolution was underway.         At the official dedication of the Concord Monument on July 4, 1837, Emerson’s poem was sung to the tune of a hymn called “The Old Hundredth,” a.k.a. “The Old 100th” or “The Old Hundred.” (Hence the use of the word “hymn” in the title.)        His memorable phrase “the shot heard round the world” created a phrase formula that has since been used to refer to various other things that generate wide attention or notoriety. The lists things said to have been heard or seen “round the world” or “around the world” are enormous. You can see more than a million examples that use “heard” in the posts shown in the Google search at this link. You can see over a million examples using “seen” in the posts at this link. Undoubtedly, there will be many more in the future. (For more background on the Emerson quote, see the post on my This Day in Quotes blog here.)

THE SLAP SEEN AROUND THE WORLD: “What bothered me most, after The Slap Seen Around the World, was how the giants of Black Hollywood immediately circled to protect Will Smith...Will anyone famous who stood and applauded Smith after his acceptance speech be asked to explain their actions? Will the Academy or Oscarcast producers explain why they allowed someone to hit a performer — a friend sent me a text joking that Ricky Gervais is lucky he’s not still hosting the Golden Globes — and then collect an award?”                     Eric Deggans        NPR TV critic and author        Deggans named actor Will Smith’s controversial public assault on comedian Chris Rock “The Slap Seen Around the World” in a post on the NPR website the day after actor Smith’s gave an open-handed sucker punch to Chris Rock at the March 27, 2022 Academy Awards. The words Smith yelled at Rock after the slap are at least a temporarily famous quotation: “Keep my wife's name out your f***ing mouth!”

THE CELEBRITY “NEWS” VARIATION: “The divorce heard round the world.”        Perez Hilton        American celebrity news blogger and “television personality”        This was Hilton’s description of “reality star” Kim Kardashian’s 2013 divorce from NBA player Kris Humphries. The divorce came just ten weeks after their obscenely lavish, apparently made-for-TV wedding brought joy to the hearts of millions of celebrity-obsessed people—and to the pocketbooks of TV shows and tabloid magazines and websites that cover such stuff, like Hilton’s site.

THE BRAIN FART VARIATION:         “The brain fart heard round the world.”        Jon Stewart        American comedian and host of The Daily Show        Stewart’s description, in a November 2011 episode The Daily Show, of Rick Perry’s “oops moment” during the November 9, 2011 Republican presidential candidate debate, when Perry said he would abolish three federal agencies if elected but was unable to name all three. Some commentators called it “the oops moment heard round the world.”

AN OLDER POLITICAL VARIATION: “The blooper heard round the world.”        TIME magazine’s, October 18, 1976        This was the headline of a TIME article about the huge gaffe made by President Gerald Ford during the October 6, 1976 presidential debate with Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter. During a part of the debate about the Soviet Union, Ford claimed “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” In fact, the Soviet Union clearly dominated a number of countries in Eastern Europe at the time, including East Germany, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Poland. The remark made Ford seem clueless about international politics. He later admitted he’d misspoken. Carter won the election.

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“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

LUCRETIUS’ ANCIENT LATIN VERSION: “Quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum.” (An early Latin version of the proverb “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”)        Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus; c. 99 B.C. - c. 55 B.C.)        Roman poet and philosopher.        These words from Book IV of Lucretius’ long poem explaining the Epicurean philosophy, De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), are often credited as either the origin or earliest known use of the saying “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” meaning that something that’s good for one person may be bad for another. It’s likely that Lucretius was repeating or riffing on an existing Latin proverb.        The meat/poison version is a popularized English translation of what Lucretius wrote. A more literal translation, like that provided by William Ellery Leonard in his classic 1916 translation of De rerum natura is “...what is food to one to some becomes fierce poison.” The Latin word cibus is usually translated as food rather than as meat. The words caro and carnis are the more common Latin words for meat. Acre means sharp, intense or fierce. Venenum can be variously translated as venom, drug, bane, curse or poison.        Thus, the English proverb could have taken many alternate forms. But it was the meat/poison version that became embedded in our language. The Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs note that by 1604 the saying was already referred to as an “ould moth-eaten” English proverb. Over the centuries, the meat vs. poison template inspired countless others, including a few that have become equally proverbial, most notably “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”        Some of my own favorite adaptations are below.

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST’S VIEWPOINT: “One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly as one beholds the same objects from a higher point.”           Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)         American essayist, poet and lecturer         A quote from his essay “Circles,” included in his book Essays, First Series (1841)

THE COMPUTER PROGRAMMER’S VIEWPOINT: “One man’s constant is another man’s variable.”          Alan J. Perlis (1922-1990)        American computer programming pioneer and longtime Chair of Computer Science at Yale        One of the most widely-quoted “Perlisms.” It’s included in his article “Epigrams in Programming,” which was published in the September 1982 journal of the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGPLAN (“Special Interest Group on Programming Languages”).        Constant and variable are terms used in computer programming. A constant is a code identifier that cannot be altered by the program during execution. A variable is an identifier for a value that can be changed as the program runs.

THE FIFTY SHADES OF GREY PRINCIPLE: “One woman’s pornographic subjugation to male power is another woman’s erotic enthrallment.”          Roberta Schreyer (1954-2001)        Associate Professor of English at Potsdam State College killed in a tragic car accident in 2001        From her essay about the controversial Brian De Palma film Body Double in the anthology Bodily Discursions: Genders, Representations, Technologies (1997).        In Body Double, an actor (played by Craig Wasson), becomes involved in a murder mystery and a relationship with a female porn movie actress named “Holly Body” (Melanie Griffith), who stars in pornographic films like Holly Does Hollywood (a faux homage to the porn classic Debby Does Dallas).

THE IFFY SHADES OF P.C. PRINCIPLE: “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist.”          Stephen Jukes        Former Global News Editor for the Reuters news agency, now a professor at Bournemouth University in the UK        An infamous quote from a memo Jukes sent to Reuters journalists shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, telling them not to use terms like terrorist and terrorist attacks to describe what most of us would call terrorists and terrorist attacks. Jukes tried to explain the policy by adding: “We’re trying to treat everyone on a level playing field, however tragic it’s been and however awful and cataclysmic for the American people and people around the world.”        The Reuters policy on “t” words has been widely criticized by some observers as an absurd example of political correctness and praised by others as an attempt at objective journalism. In reality, it did not turn out to be an actual ban on “t” words in Reuters articles. Many Reuters news stories use terms like terrorists, terrorist attack and acts of terrorism when they are based on things said or written by government officials or other people who are quoted or cited.

THE LAZARUS LONG THEOLOGY PRINCIPLE: “One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.”          Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)         American writer best known for his science fiction stories and novels        This is one of the many witty aphorisms of the main character in Heinlein’s novel Time Enough for Love: the Lives of Lazarus Long (1973). It’s included in the chapter titled: “INTERMISSION: Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long,” just before the before the belly laugh-worthy observation: “Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys: it’s more sanitary.”

THE FISH PUN VARIATION: “One woman’s meat is another woman’s poisson.”          Gwen Davis        American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, songwriter, journalist and poet        A quip in her novel Romance (1983), using the French word for word for fish

THE DOG PUN VARIATION: “One man’s pet is another man’s peeve.”          Poster tagline for the comedy movie How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog (2000)        In the movie, an L.A. playwright (played by Kenneth Branagh) is plagued by a series of annoyances, including a senile mother-in-law, a wife whose biological clock is ticking, impotency, writer’s block and a neighborhood dog that barks all night.

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From “Absolutism tempered by assassination” to today’s “Ideology untempered by pragmatism”…

THE FAMOUS, VARIABLY-QUOTED PHRASE: “Absolutism tempered by assassination.”        German diplomat Georg Herbert zu Münster (1820-1902)        Quoting an unnamed Russian in Chapter II of his book Political Sketches of the States of Europe 1814-1857 (published in 1868)           “Absolutism tempered by assassination” is the usual translation of the phrase Münster used that’s cited by many books of quotations and websites, though original translations gave it as “Absolutism moderated by assassination.” In the book, Münster wrote: “An intelligent Russian once remarked to us, ‘Every country has its own constitution; ours is absolutism moderated by assassination.’” Other sources, all of which seem to have been published after 1868, say that a similar quote was said to Münster’s father Ernst Friedrich Herbert zu Münster (1766-1839), who was also a German diplomat. According to those sources, when Czar Paul I was assassinated in 1801, a Russian nobleman told Ernst, in French: “Le despotisme tempéré par l’assassinat, c’est notre Magna Charta” — which translates as “Despotism tempered by assassination, that is our Magna Carta.”

THE IDIOCY OF IDEOLOGY UNTEMPERED BY PRAGMATISM: “The people we elected to represent us on the national stage, people who are supposed to be leaders, are too immature and fixed in ideology untempered by pragmatism to sit down and compromise with each other. The atrocious partisan nature of the Senate and the House would be humorous if our livelihoods didn't hang in the balance.”          Editorial about the budget stalemate in Congress, in the Times Beacon Record, October 6, 2013. (Cartoon by Tom Stiglich)

THE FAMOUS (BUT APPARENTLY PHONY) VOLTAIRE QUOTE: “The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.”        Attributed to Voltaire (1694-1778)          French novelist, philosopher, poet and historian        Although this quote is widely attributed to Voltaire, it does not seem to appear in any of his writings.

THE OPTIMIST’S VIEW OF DEMOCRACY: “If we substitute elective dictatorship tempered by assassination at the ballot box, we have a system with more virtues than flaws.”        Bruce Anderson        Columnist for the UK Independent        In an opinion piece posted on the Independent’s website, February 27, 2006

THE CULTURED VIEW OF DEMOCRACY: “Tyranny is usually tempered with assassination, and Democracy must be tempered with culture. In the absence of this, it turns into a representation of collective folly.”        John Stuart Mackenzie (1860–1935)        British philosopher        In his book An Introduction to Social Philosophy (1895)

THE CYNIC’S VIEW OF DEMOCRACY: “RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections.”        Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913)        American writer and curmudgeon        One of the satiric definitions in his book The Devil’s Dictionary (1925)

EMERSON’S STILL-RELEVANT COMMENT ABOUT CERTAIN WARS: “The President proclaims war, and those Senators who dissent are not those who know better, but those who can afford to...Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”        Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)        American Philosopher, essayist and poet           In an entry in his journal written in 1847, after American President James K. Polk declared war on Mexico

DEAN ACHESON’S RANT ABOUT DEMOCRACY: “I think Churchill is right, the only thing to be said for democracy is that there is nothing else that’s any better, and therefore he used to say, Tyranny tempered by assassination, but lots of assassination. People say, If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better. I say the Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.”        Dean Acheson (1893-1971)        U.S. Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman        In an interview with Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie on June 30, 1971

THE PUBLIC EXPLODER OPTION: “After many unhappy experiments in the direction of an ideal Republic, it was found that what may be described as a Despotism tempered by Dynamite provides, on the whole, the most satisfactory description of ruler — an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic power.”        Gilbert and Sullivan (W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan)        Said by the character Calynx (originally played by Bowden Haswell) in Gilbert and Sullivan’s penultimate comic opera Utopia, Limited, or The Flowers of Progress (1893), which is set in a mythical South Seas island where kings who “lapse from political or social propriety” are blown up by “The Public Exploder.”

LIBERALISM VS. CONSERVATISM: “Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of the people tempered by fear.”        William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)        British Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister four times between 1868 and 1894        This oft-quoted definition of “Liberalism” and “Conservatism” comes from a speech Gladstone gave in Plumstead, England, in 1878

A CLERGYMAN’S CALL FOR UNITY: “Of course, the great drawback to democracy is that it’s messy. And the real danger of democracy is disunity…The key is democracy tempered by love and acceptance; where you accept the fact that you don’t always get your own way and not everyone sees things the way you do.”        Reverend Robert Cleveland        American Universalist minister        From a sermon he gave at the First Universalist Church of Central Square in New York, July 24, 2005

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Nature and other things that abhor a vacuum (aside from cats and dogs)...

THE FAMOUS PROVERBIAL QUOTE: “Nature abhors a vacuum.”        Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)        Dutch philosopher        Quoting an old Latin proverb in his book Ethics (1677)

COMMENT ON THE ARIZONA SHOOTING: “Does a lack of civility in our speech and blatant disregard for the right of people with differing opinions promote and encourage those with violent tendencies to act out?...Nature abhors a vacuum. If we don't implement new behaviors, we'll return to the status quo. Human nature is like that.”        Dr. Judith Rich        Psychologist and author        In an opinion piece on The Huffington Post, January 19, 2011        Commenting on the January 8, 2011 shooting spree by Jared Loughner, who killed six people and wounded 14 others, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords

COUNTERQUOTE ON THE ARIZONA SHOOTING: “Nature abhors a vacuum, so send in the clowns. As great as America is, we still have crazy people. We still have criminals. The tragic shooting will resurrect attempts of failed gun prohibitionists to use this time of sorrow for their own gain...The truth is you cannot legislate crazy.”        Rev. Kenn Blanchard         Blogger and host of the “Urban Shooter Podcast: The Pro-Gun Variety Show”         In a post about Jared Loughner on his blog on the AmmoLand.com website, January 10, 2011

VICTOR HUGO’S OBSERVATION ON HATE: “The mind, like nature, abhors vacuum. Into emptiness, nature puts love; the mind often puts hate. Hate occupies. Hate for hate’s sake exists…A man hates: he must do something.”        Victor Hugo (1802-1885)        French poet, playwright, novelist,        In his novel L’Homme Qui Rit (The Man Who Laughs), first published in 1869

THE SPIRITUAL VACUUM VERSION: “Nature abhors a vacuum, even a spiritual one. People who've lost their beliefs, they’re like empty vessels, more susceptible to having their lives taken over by forces bigger than themselves.”        Father Kennedy (actor Jude Ciccolella) in the movie Premonition (2007)

EMERSON’S OBSERVATION ON OLD AGE: “Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.”        Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)        American essayist, lecturer and poet        In his essay “Circles,” published in Essays, First Series (1841)        (Cartoon by J.C. Duffy.)

THOREAU’S OBSERVATION ON BUSINESS: “Most men are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum, and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man’s nobler faculties.”        Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)        American writer, philosopher and social critic        In an entry in his journal dated April 27, 1854

A DYSTOPIAN TAKE ON LONGEVITY: “Nature abhors longevity…You sure you want this? The problems that would arise for human longevity are legion. How would we feed everyone? Who decides who can have kids? Do we throw all new people off the planet?”        Ethicist Don Lee        In an opinion piece posted on the Seattle PI Reader site

THE PROHIBITION PRINCIPLE: “Drinking abhors a vacuum. If there were no saloon, another drinking place would be found.”        Historian Andrew Sinclair        In his book Prohibition, the Era of Excess (1962)

THE HOLLYWOOD PRINCIPLE: “Nature abhors a vacuum, but not Hollywood. They've created the contemporary romantic comedy, a seemingly endless string of them over the last several years, all formulaic, predictable, many similar in plot…and just when you thought it was safe to go back into the movie theater, another shallow, existential black hole of a film appears.”        Journalist and critic Chris Honoré        In a movie review published in the Ashland Daily Tidings, January 27, 2011

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Further reading: some recently-published and forthcoming books of quotations…