You would not believe the beautiful and poetic insights Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Bob Marley and Paul Newman had about marriage.
Actually, you should not believe them.
Those pretty words floating around the internet and decorating so many wedding websites were not said by these well-known figures.
When my wife, Gia, and I were planning our recent wedding, we wanted readings for family and friends. Gia found online an Apache blessing that begins, “Now you will feel no rain / For each of you will be shelter to the other.” But she explored further and discovered the blessing was actually from the Jimmy Stewart movie “Broken Arrow,” adapted from the novel “Blood Brother” by Elliott Arnold, a writer from Brooklyn who was not Native American.
“That’s cultural appropriation that isn’t even appropriating something Apache to begin with,” said Marcus Macktima, a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe who teaches history at Northern Arizona University. “It perpetuates concepts and ideas of what an Apache is in the American imagination, but it’s not real.”
Then Gia found a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein that ends, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” Her skepticism led her to the website Quote Investigator, which explained that Einstein said something like that to illustrate his theory of relativity, not to talk about love. The reading’s first part seems to have been grafted on to create a romance angle.
We kept looking for actual readings from actual people. After seeing the poem “These I Can Promise,” widely attributed to Mark Twain, I contacted the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn., which put me in touch with Steve Courtney, a Mark Twain researcher. He reached out to Quote Investigator. The site’s examination revealed that the poem apparently debuted in a New Jersey newspaper in 1971, though it wasn’t attributed to Twain until 2004.
“Twain would be astonished and insulted that such a banal poem would be attributed to him,” Ron Chernow, a Mark Twain biographer, said. “How this particular syrupy poem could possibly be considered something from Mark Twain’s pen is mystifying.”
More modern pop culture superstars have had quotes wrongly attributed to them as well. Paul Newman supposedly wrote “The Art of Marriage,” but Snopes has declared that false. And Bob Marley neither said nor wrote the words printed in his name under “He’s Not Perfect,” according to Roger Steffens, who has written eight books about him and once spent two weeks on the road with him.
“That quote has never shown up anywhere in my research,” Mr. Steffens said. “There’s not a hint of patois, and it’s too perfect in standard English. Anybody who claims that it’s a Bob Marley quote is out of their mind.”
These quotations can sound like “something from Pinterest that somebody got from a fortune cookie,” said Ariel Meadow Stallings, the founder of Offbeat Wed, a wedding planning site.
I reached out to several of the offending wedding websites for comments. Some, like the Knot and Zola, did not respond. “These wedding websites are not journalism businesses,” Ms. Stallings said.
Love My Dress, a bridal website, did add notes to its pages about Twain, Marley and the Apache blessing to explain the readings’ dubious origins. And Jennifer Read-Dominguez, the editor of Rock My Wedding, a British wedding planning site, said in an email that she recognized that some pieces bloggers put on the site “may have less verified origins than was initially thought.”
“We’re now actively reviewing the archive with that in mind,” she added. (So far, there have been no changes on the site.)
The lingering question, of course, is how much all of this matters, both at any particular ceremony and in a larger context.
People hope that quoting a famous person “somehow will deepen the profundity of the quote,” Mr. Chernow said. “But if they’re using a misattribution to try to flaunt his or her literacy, they’re actually betraying their own ignorance.”
Ms. Stallings, whose site calls out the so-called Apache blessing as “fakelore,” characterized it as “a 20th-century white man’s fantasy about what Native American people might say.” Mr. Macktima said that he found the distortion of his culture by “commercialized media and popular culture” troubling.
Larger issues surround these false attributions, including the distortion of our understanding of who these people really were, Mr. Chernow said. Biographers devote their lives to “scraping away the misunderstandings” like the ones these false quotations create, he said.
“We try to lay down a foundation of fact, which we like to think is the basis of our society and civil discourse,” Mr. Chernow said. “But we’re living in a culture with a great deal of misinformation floating around, and these quotes may be a sign of the times.”
Mike Caulfield, an author of “Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online,” is concerned with the way unchecked social media and A.I. are creating distortions of reality.
These quotations are not high on the list of disinformation crimes, he said, but the “slop” of fake wedding quotations (which predates A.I.) does create harm. They “rob us of the strength of understanding the past properly,” he said.
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