"Ballads, bons mots, and anecdotes give us better insights into the depths of past centuries than grave and voluminous chronicles."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mission |
Future |
Scope |
Trivia |
Omissions |
A Word About Jokes |
Quotations | A Brief History of Anecdotage.com | A Brief History of The Anecdote
We are currently home to several thousand humorous &/or inspirational items covering everything from acrobats and acronyms to zippers and zoos...
We aim to remain "The World's Widest Web of Celebrity Anecdotes"!
Technological advances promise to enhance the lives of anecdote junkies around the globe:
* "Collaborative filtering" - whereby a user's ratings (of books or movies, for example) are compared with those of like-minded users to produce other book or movie suggestions - might someday be used on this site.
* Artificial intelligence might someday yield anecdotage.com agents to crawl the internet in search of worthy content.
* An "open source" system might someday allow anecdotage.com to evolve into a self-governing user-managed global community.
Unrealistic? Perhaps ;)
While our content is largely confined to biographical incidents (noncontextual quotations more properly being the province of, for example, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations), we have included a number of "origin" stories, mythological tales, practical jokes, and wisecracks of the Oscar Wilde-Groucho Marx variety.
It is not always easy to distinguish between anecdote and trivia. Giovanni Vigliotto is surely the only human being ever to have married four unsuspecting women aboard a single cruise ship. Is this an anecdote? We think so.
On the other hand, while Professor Maurice Yonge is surely the only human being ever to have read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from cover to cover while sitting on the Great Barrier Reef, this detail seems less significant and has not found its way into our collection. Oddity alone will not quite do.
At the opposite exteme lie several stories (Van Gogh's ear-severing episode, for example) which are too significant to qualify as anecdotes and are more properly treated as chapters in a proper biography. Many unforgettable historical accounts - Phidippides "Marathon" run to announce the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 BC - also fall into this nonanecdotal category.
Missing Persons
While charismatic individuals (Groucho Marx, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Dorothy Parker, Kevin Spacey, and George Clooney, for example) tend to generate reams of risible anecdotes, others live quiet lives and leave few memorable stories behind. Goethe for example, despite his titanic prominence in the literary pantheon, was certainly no mass-producer of "titanecdotes".
Indeed, our catalog is admittedly riddled with holes (though some of these have been papered over with relatively mediocre anecdotes smuggled into the collection in the interest of comprehensiveness).
Religions
The Koran and the Bible's Old and New Testaments certainly contain many of the greatest stories ever told. However, the ancient Islamic and Hebraic tempers did not lend themselves to the production of anecdotes and visitors in search of Biblical or Koranic enlightenment may be somewhat disappointed.
Gender
Many visitors (half?) may find our collection somewhat deficient in anecdotes pertaining to women. Please rest assured that any deficiency reflects historical rather than editorial bias. Indeed, it is our sincere hope that, as the site grows, this gender gap will slowly close.
Regions
Gross national production - whether economic or anecdotal - is a function of national wealth and stories about Africa and Latin America tend, sadly, to pertain more often to political coups and poverty than to film or science.
Similarly, anecdotes pertaining to the magnificent eastern cultures (India, China, Japan) are also in sadly short supply. The East, whether Near, Middle, or Far, is simply not attuned to the western conception of the anecdote, just as eastern cultures do not typically produce light verse, television sitcoms, Harlequin Romances and spaghetti Westerns. Indeed, "Asianecdotes" tend either to be historical epics or moral parables and, anecdotically speaking it seems, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.
Even in the west, the anecdote has flourished most in open societies which enjoy a strong democratic tradition, and Russian anecdotes, for example, more often pertain to communism and espionage than, say, to the theater or literature.
Many standard jokes exist in a variety of forms, each with a different illustrious person assuming the helm. As such generic stories are typically not verifiable, we have chosen not to include them on this site. A few examples which did not make the cut:
* One morning, a certain American senator instructed his attorney to notify him as soon as a judgment was handed down in a case concerning his involvement in an influence-peddling scheme. Early that afternoon, he received a fax: "JUSTlCE HAS PREVAILED. "He immediately faxed back: "APPEAL AT ONCE!"
* A certain society matron, visiting the Louvre, stopped before a famous painting of a dirtypeasant. "Isn`t that just like them?" she remarked. "Too poor to buy decent clothes, but he can afford to have his portrait painted!"
* A certain diplomat visiting China once rambled on for several minutes telling a story to his hosts. Curiously, the interpreter remained respectfully silent. Having finished, the diplomat was astonished to find everyone heartily laughing after his interpreter had saidonly a few words. "How did you tell the story so quickly?" the diplomat asked. "Story too long," the interpreter replied. "So I say: `He tell joke. Laugh.`"
"If the information glut can be likened to the danger of eating too much, anecdotage... is like scarfing down too many sweets: It is a short-cut to quick pleasure and short-term satisfaction, but ultimately it can be unfulfilling, and even dangerous - 'empty calories' that can disturb a nutritious regimen."
-- Will Winton
"When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world."
-- Benjamin Disraeli in Lothair (1870)
"Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles."
-- Plutarch
"One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography."
-- William Ellery Channing
"[From anecdotes one] can distinguish a true picture of the customs and characters of any given period."
-- Prosper McRimee
"Three anecdotes may suffice to paint a picture of a man."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Opinions are fallible, but not examples."
-- Isaac D'Israeli, Dissertation on Anecdotes)
"Ballads, bons mots, and anecdotes give us better insights into the depths of past centuries than grave and voluminous chronicles."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Looking back on my life, it seems to me it has been a long string of anecdotes... If I am lucky, [death] will simply be the last anecdote."
-- George Mikes
| A Brief History of Anecdotage.com |
"One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography."
-- William Ellery Channing
Whence did anecdotage.com originate? Well, one wintry eve near the turn of the Millennium, a certain surf-a-holic scribe (your trivia-mad editor) searched google.com for a classic anecdote about Winston Churchill - and was astonished by the result:
According to Google, the prefered search engine among the blognoscenti, the search in question "did not match any documents."
Come again? Google - a tool which might, for example, yield 150+ results for a search on "Fork in the eye" or "musical toilet seat" - returned no results!?
Nevermind that the very word 'anecdote' stems from a Greek word (anekdota) meaning 'unpublished items'. A remarkable cyber-niche remained conspicuously unoccupied and, like Mother Nature, your editor abhors a vacuum...
| A Brief History of The Anecdote |
"Three anecdotes may suffice to paint a picture of a man."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Definitions |
Etymology |
Origins |
Evolution |
Authenticity |
Disclaimers
Anecdotage:
SYLLABICATION: anˇecˇdotˇage
PRONUNCIATION: an'ˇikˇ'dohˇtij
NOUN: Anecdotes considered as a group.
Anecdote:
SYLLABICATION: anˇecˇdote
PRONUNCIATION: an'ˇikˇdote
NOUN: 1. A short account of an interesting or humorous incident. 2. Inflected forms: pl. anˇecˇdotes or anˇecˇdoˇta. Secret or hitherto undivulged particulars of history or biography.
NOUN: 1. A usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident."
Ana:
NOUN: 1. Collected items of information, esp. anecdotal or bibliographical.
[Sources: American HeritageŽ Dictionary of the English Language; Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary]
ETYMOLOGY: French, from Greek anekdota, unpublished items : an- (not) + ekdota (neuter pl. of ekdotos, published).
[Source: American HeritageŽ Dictionary of the English Language]
Whence do anecdotes derive? Like everything from fast food to flush toilets, what we now call anecdotes likely originated in classical Greece. The Italian scholar Arnaldo Momigliano, in his
Development of Greek Biography, suggested that the anecdote's founding father may have been the musical theorist Aristoxenus of Tarentum (born c. 370 BC):
"Perhaps he was... the first to make anecdotes an essential part of biography," Momigliano declared. "I suspect that we owe to Aristoxenus the notion that a good biography is full of good anecdotes."
Anecdotes tend to be primarily an urban phenomenon. Mountain Men and rural folk more often spin yarns than anecdotes. Similarly, desert and peasant cultures are rarely rich repositories of anecdotal lore. Perhaps bite-sized anecdotes hold more appeal to those born and bred in a fast-paced MTV-news-McNugget culture.
Indeed, it is a nation's courts, parliaments, precincts and hospitals rather than its ranches and villages which generate the bulk of its anecdotes.
The anecdote is also chiefly a social product: universities,
clubs,
theaters, and
dinner parties are all anecdotal mother lodes.
Though borrowed from the French, the term 'anecdote' ultimately derives from a nearly identical Greek word (anekdota) meaning "things not given out," (or not published). It is in this sense that Cicero once used it to describe some of his own manuscripts, a usage followed by Renaissance scholars to denote manuscripts discovered in libraries and subsequently published (not to be confused with 'lacunae': a gap, as in such a library, from which the word 'lagoon' derives).
From the very outset the word also carried a connotation of secrecy or gossip. As a biographical device, the anecdote was (and remains) unofficial, trivial - perhaps even heretical. Its shady reputation probably derives from the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius, who called his posthumously published, scandalous account of the Emperor Justinian Anecdota or Historia Arcana ("Secret History").
The Classical Period
Classical anecdotes typically embodied ancient wisdom or philosophical insight (as when Diogenes explained to Alexander the Great why he was examining a heap of human bones: "I am searching for the bones of your father, but I cannot distinguish them from those of his slaves.")
The Renaissance
It was not until the Renaissance, with the growth of the city, the royal court, and the middle class, that the anecdote, began to emerge as a common form rather than a mere vehicle for salacious gossip.
18th Century
Such eighteenth century writers as Jeremiah Whitaker Newman (1759-1819), author of Alphabetical Anecdotes, conceived of the anecdote as a short biography, often of an obscure person whose life was in some sense striking or odd. Indeed, Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary, defined the anecdote as "a biographical incident, a minute passage of private life."
Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848), however, credited the French with broadening the term to apply to "any interesting circumstance" (Dissertation on Anecdotes).
The eighteenth century also marked the beginning of the association of anecdotes with the wit of old men, which may be traced to the French aphorist Rivarol (1753-1801). The old pun about growing into one's "anecdotage" may have been invented by John Wilkes (1727-1797) or Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) but was popularized by Benjamin Disraeli, who declared in 1870 (in Lothair) that "when a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world."
19th Century
Much of what passed as anecdotage in the nineteenth century would strike a 21st Century observer as painfully dull. A nineteenth century collection entitled The Percy Anecdotes offered such gems as this:
When the late Marquis of Cornwallis was leaving a nobleman's house and stepping into his carriage, a servant offered to hold an umbrella over him. "Take that thing away," said his lordship. "I am neither sugar nor salt, to suffer by a shower of rain."
20th Century
Not until the twentieth century did humor become a key anecdotal characteristic. It was twentieth century anecdotes - the short and sweet biographical punchlines - which Winston Churchill once called "the gleaming toys of history."
[Adapted in part from Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
]
"He was born. He lived. He died."
-- Martin Heidegger on Aristotle
The precise origins of many anecdotes are lost in or obsured by the mists of time. Nonetheless, it behooves us, even as pop historians, not to underestimate the importance of proper attribution and authenticity. (Those for whom such ideals are unimportant might prefer to visit sites like these.)
* One day, Kant overheard several anecdotes being told about one of his contemporaries. "It seems to me I recall similar anecdotes about other great figures," he remarked. "But that is to be expected. Great men are like high church towers: around both there is apt to be a great deal of wind."
We have endeavored to exclude articles which are obviously apocryphal or otherwise inauthentic, and to provide the means (sources, for example) for visitors to judge for themselves. For even when an anecdote is positively attributable to a given individual, the possibility of contrivance still exists. Take, for example, the following cautionary tales:
* On the day on which the Comte d'Artois (later King Charles X) entered Paris, Talleyrand asked a group assembled in his drawing room what the Bourbon prince had said. "Nothing at all" came the answer. Talleyrand, not satisfied, ordered a well-known political writer to leave the room and compose an appropriate remark for the official record. The writer made three tries, all inadequate. Finally he returned with the words: "Nothing is changed in France; there is only one Frenchman more." Talleyrand applauded and another classic 'anecdote' was born.
* In 1923, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, nearing the end, found himself at a loss for suitably profound famous last words. "Don't let it end like this," he pleaded. "Tell them I said something!"
Clearly, the battle for authenticity will never be an easy one. As Will Winton once observed (in a review of a chapter fittingly entitled "Anecdotage" in David Shenk's Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut):
"Combined with the general American apathy towards public affairs, the propensity to believe anything that sounds reasonable leads to the dissemination of apocrypha clothed in the garments of revealed truths... [Consider] President Reagan's 'Welfare Queens,' President Bush's 'Supermarket Scanner,' and President Clinton's infamous Air Force One haircut that supposedly tied up air traffic over Los Angeles for hours. As these stories demonstrate, in our age of 'instant instance,' lies 'will move so much faster than truth, [that] they will too often become the truth'. As one who deals regularly with a predominantly misinformed public on a daily basis, this reviewer encounters anecdotage on a scale that would cause a Welfare Queen to blush."
1) It should be apparent, in light of the foregoing discussion, that anecdotal authenticity can never be fully guaranteed. Indeed, while many resources have been marshalled in an effort to distinguish fact from fiction (and to flag apocryphal items), a final anecdote may serve as a warning to you, the reader:
A venerable president of Magdalen College, Oxford, Martin Joseph Routh, approaching his hundredth year, was one day asked by an admirer whether any single axiom or precept could be abstracted from his long life's experience. The president reflected for some time before replying. "I think, sir," he said, "since you come for the advice of an old man, sir, that you will find it a very good practice always to verify your references!"
2) On a less serious note, please heed the following warning: "If the information glut can be likened to the danger of eating too much, anecdotage... is like scarfing down too many sweets: It is a short-cut to quick pleasure and short-term satisfaction, but ultimately it can be unfulfilling, and even dangerous - 'empty calories' that can disturb a nutritious regimen."
