Gideon Rachman has a nice post on apocryphal phrases:
I was amused to read this column by one of President Carter’s former speech-writers,
pointing out that Carter never used the word “malaise” in the famous
speech in 1979 that became known as the “malaise speech”. A shame since
both the speech and the phrase have come to define the Carter era as
one of gloom and defeatism.
The anecdote supports a personal theory of mine that a great many
era-defining sayings are apocryphal. James Callaghan, Britain’s prime
minister in the late 1970s, was lambasted for saying “Crisis, what
crisis” when he returned from an overseas trip to a strike-torn
Britain. Except he never said it. It was a newspaper headline
purporting to summarise his comments.
Margaret Thatcher’s most famous saying is “There is no alternative”.
And yet I am assured by better-informed colleagues that she never
actually said that.
