a public post for once, after all the friends-only ones

[joculum]

The discussion on crowleycrow LJ of "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout" has revealed the sheer variety of versions of this anecdote that exist on the Web. I am still ninety per cent certain that it was William James who wrote down this remarkable revelation of the secret of the universe just before lapsing into unconsciousness in experiments with ether (unless it was nitrous oxide) but in that case we need a reliable textual source, which we do not have. Surely someone out there with university connections can log onto a William James searchable database and produce chapter and verse?

The round robin of slowly altering anecdotes is nothing short of remarkable. (Bertrand Russell told the story with the punchline above, rather than "A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout," a common variant, and ascribed it to an anonymous individual; there is at least one website on which it has become Russell who had the experience, and the revelation was another commonly cited quotation).

Oral cultures are said by some to preserve, rather than alter, transmitted sayings. Presumably (just as Plato's Socrates tells us that Thamus predicted when Thoth invented writing), when literate individuals transmit the stories they remember, they show that their capacity to recall things accurately has gone to hell in a handbasket. (I had to look up the passage from Plato because, well, I only semi-remembered it and had thought it was in the Hermetic writings where one would expect to find a story about Thoth.)

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Actually, non-literate and semi-literate people usually change what they transmit. Which is why folklore has so many conflicting versions of various stories. And why folksongs almost always have different versions.

And, for that matter, why spoken language changes faster than written language does.

[joculum.livejournal.com]

This is what I thought, but there was a once-fashionable notion based on the relatively slight variation of certain folk epics that core verses were transmitted relatively uncorrupted (which is also why you find so many verses in folk songs that have nothing at all to do with the rest of the song but are identical to verses of other songs, or find one of the Sorrows of Mary inserted unaccountably into the Joys of Mary).

Glad to know my original common sense view turns out to be right.