Incorrect Quotes Generator

What the incorrect quotes generator does

You want a twisted saying. Something for a caption, a signature, a card, a slide, a laugh.

This gives you one. Press the button and read it.

And then, if you like, find out what you have actually got, because these things are a recognised category with a proper name, there is a professor who spent forty years on them, and the oldest one on record is about two and a half thousand years old.

How to use it

Press Generate for one, or a handful to pick from, then Copy to take it with you.

The joke happens in the gap

Read this slowly and pay attention to your own head while you do it.

An apple a day keeps...

You finished it. You could not stop yourself. Before your eyes got to the next word, some part of you had already put the doctor away down on the table, because it has been sitting in your head since you were five and it does not ask permission.

And then the sentence actually says: anyone away, if thrown hard enough.

That little jolt you felt is the entire mechanism. That is where the joke lives. Not in the words. In the distance between what you had already decided was coming and what turned up.

Which means something slightly odd. The joke is not in the sentence. The joke is in you. The sentence is only the trigger. All the funny is stored in your head already, and this thing walked in and set it off.

And it explains a rule that sounds obvious and is actually quite deep. The scholars who study these state it flatly: to have full effect, one of these must be based on a proverb the hearer already knows.

If at first you don't succeed, quit is only funny if you are carrying try, try again. To somebody who has never heard the original, that is not a joke. It is just bad advice.

So every single one of these needs a host. It cannot live on its own. It is not a saying, it is a parasite on a saying, and it dies instantly outside the head of somebody who already knows the thing it is feeding on.

Which is why they do not translate, incidentally. You can translate the words perfectly and get nothing, because you have moved the sentence somewhere the host does not live.

These have a name, and a man to blame

The word is anti-proverb, and it was coined in 1982 by a man called Wolfgang Mieder.

He built it off the German, Antisprichwort, and his definition is worth having exactly: parodied, twisted, or fractured proverbs that reveal humorous or satirical speech play with traditional proverbial wisdom.

The wider field is called paremiology, from the Greek paroimia, proverb. It is the scholarly study of proverbs and it goes back at least as far as Aristotle. There are people whose entire academic career is proverbs, and Mieder is the most prominent of them by a distance. Alan Dundes, who was no small figure himself, called him Magister Proverbium, paremiologist without peer.

He edited a journal called Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship from 1984 to 2021. Thirty seven years. There is an annual journal of proverb scholarship, it has been running for decades, and one man edited nearly all of it.

His collection Antisprichwörter came out in three volumes between 1982 and 1989, systematically gathering hundreds of these things out of folklore and popular culture and taking them seriously. Then in 1999 he and Anna Litovkina published Twisted Wisdom: Modern Anti-Proverbs, which is what made the term stick in English.

And here is the part I like. Mieder's actual definition of a proverb, the straight kind, is this: a short, generally known sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals and traditional views, in a metaphorical, fixed and memorable form, handed down from generation to generation.

Read that, then read always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

It is short. It is fixed. It is memorable. It is metaphorical. It gets handed around. It contains, if you look at it sideways, a genuine truth about people.

It ticks every box on the definition of the thing it is making fun of.

Aristophanes was doing this in 421 BC

The word is from 1982. The behaviour is not.

In his play Peace, Aristophanes takes a standard Greek proverb, the hasty bitch gives birth to blind, which is about rushing things and getting a bad result. And he swaps one word. He replaces kuon, meaning bitch, with kodon, meaning bell, to produce a nonsense compound.

The hasty bellfinch gives birth to blind.

One consonant. That is the whole joke. It is a pun on a proverb everybody in the theatre had known since childhood, and it landed, and somebody wrote it down, and it is still legible two and a half thousand years later.

There is a better one. Stratonicus of Athens wanted to mock a musician who had been nicknamed the Ox. The standard proverb was the ass hears the lyre, which is about somebody who has no idea what they are listening to.

He changed one animal.

The Ox hears the lyre.

That is a devastating thing to say about a professional musician, it takes three seconds, and it works entirely by being one word away from something the whole room already had memorised. The audience does the work. He just points.

They turn up in Oulipo, the French experimental writing group, who called them perverbs and treated them as a form. They turn up in graffiti, which is where a lot of the good ones live. They turn up in advertising, because it is free familiarity, so Red Robin can say put your burger where your mouth is and everybody hears both sentences at once. And they turn up on T-shirts, where the best of them is probably taste makes waist.

So the sequence runs: a comic playwright in Athens, a Greek musician's insult, a French avant-garde movement, a wall, a burger chain, a T-shirt, and a button on this page.

Same trick every time. Take the thing everybody knows. Change one word.

Taking one apart

There is one in this list that is not like the others, and it is the best sentence on the page.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Watch what your head does with the second half.

You read fruit flies as a verb phrase, because you have just been trained by the first half. Time flies. Fruit flies. Same shape, keep going. And then like a banana arrives and the whole thing collapses and rebuilds itself, and now fruit flies is an insect and like is a verb and the sentence means something completely different from the one you were reading a second ago.

That is called a garden path sentence. You get led up one, cheerfully, and then the path stops and you have to walk back.

And this one is famous well beyond jokes. It is one of the standard examples in linguistics and in computing of why parsing a sentence is hard, because the words time, flies and like can each be more than one part of speech, and the sentence is genuinely ambiguous. A machine reading it has to choose, and it has no good reason to choose correctly.

Which is why the joke and the research problem are the same object. The machine gets stuck for the same reason you laughed. Both of you committed early, and both of you were wrong.

Now look back at the rest of the list and notice they are all doing a version of it. The early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. You have to hold two proverbs at once, one about being first and one about mousetraps, and the sentence makes them argue. Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes. The original said there is a great woman, and the swap is not just a joke, it is a rebuttal.

They are not random silliness. Every one of them has picked a specific load-bearing word and pulled it.

Why a broken proverb proves the proverb is alive

Here is the thought I would leave you with.

You cannot parody something that is dead.

Try it. Take a proverb nobody says any more and twist it. Nothing happens. There is no jolt, because there was nothing in the reader's head to jolt against. The joke needs a target that is loaded and ready, and only a living proverb is loaded.

So every anti-proverb is a receipt. Every single one is proof that the original is still installed in millions of people, still firing automatically, still finishing itself before anybody asks it to.

Which flips the usual complaint on its head. People say these things are corrosive, that we are wearing away the old wisdom by making fun of it.

The opposite. The jokes are the vital signs. As long as somebody can make you laugh by breaking an apple a day, that proverb is more alive than most of the sentences you will read today. The day it stops being funny is the day it has actually gone.

Mieder's own line about the field is that proverbs have never been sacrosanct. People have been using them as satirical and ironic material for as long as there have been proverbs. The mockery is not what happens after the tradition dies. The mockery is part of how it stays.

How this list was chosen

Nothing clever.

Each one was picked by hand, choosing ones where the original is still live enough in English for the trick to work. A press of Generate draws at random, and nothing repeats in a batch.

The whole thing works offline in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere.

Questions people ask

Do these have a proper name?

Anti-proverbs. Wolfgang Mieder coined the term in 1982, from the German Antisprichwort. Oulipo called them perverbs. Everybody else calls them twisted or fractured proverbs, which is also fine.

Is there really an academic field for this?

Paremiology, the study of proverbs, and it is old enough to reach back to Aristotle. There is an annual journal, Proverbium, and Mieder edited it from 1984 to 2021.

Why are they funny?

Because you finished the sentence before you read it, and then it went somewhere else. The laugh is the sound of your prediction being corrected. Which is why one of these lands instantly or not at all, depending entirely on whether you already knew the original.

Why do they not work in other languages?

Because you cannot move the joke without moving the proverb it feeds on. Translate the words and you get a sentence that means the same thing and does nothing at all, because there is no longer anything in the reader's head for it to hit.

How old are they?

Aristophanes used one on stage in the fifth century BC, twisting a familiar proverb by a single consonant. So: older than most proverbs you know.

Are these the same as incorrect quotes from Tumblr?

Not quite. That style puts invented dialogue in the mouths of characters. These are twisted proverbs, which is a much older and more formal category, and there is a whole scholarly literature on them. Both are funny for the same underlying reason, which is that you know what was supposed to come next.

References

1. Anti-proverb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-proverb
2. Wolfgang Mieder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Mieder
3. Anti-Proverbs. In Introduction to Paremiology. Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-91198-4_2
4. Mieder, W. and Litovkina, A. T. (1999). Twisted Wisdom: Modern Anti-Proverbs. Burlington: The University of Vermont. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328029525_Anti-Proverbs