Einsteinian Drift

I have to resist correcting people

I guess it’s a consequence of having a lifetime hunger and thirst for knowledge. As a kid, I read the Oxford Dictionary. I also read most of the 2 edition version of the Winkler Prins encyclopedia in Dutch. I have to admit that I did that with a Dutch-English translation book because I wasn’t sure about a lot of the Dutch names for things. As an adult doing conference and business presentations in Holland, I would come to realise how fluent I really was. For everyday Dutch, not a problem, but business speak was different, full of jargon and colloquialisms that were new to me.

I loved it when Microsoft Encarta came out because I could turn do and test my learning in their games and quizzes. It was probably my first real online educational experience with dopamine. It was a game-changer.

The only time my father came to my school between 1st and 5th form was after an altercation with my Form 1 homeroom teacher at Glen Eden Intermediate School. My teacher had short man syndrome, aka a Napoleon Complex (my diagnosis) and often got his facts wrong as he expounded his stories from the front of the room of school kids who he thought were sufficiently ill-informed to believe him. Sadly this 10-year-old was pretty well informed.

Guess who would contradict him in front of the class? I couldn’t help myself. It was a place of learning and he was teaching ‘facts’ that were wrong.

One day, I took it too far and must have corrected him for about the 4th time in that period. He stood me up from my chair and yelled at me. “I’m the teacher! You’re the student. Shut up or leave the room and you can go on detention!”

“Then you need to get your facts straight!” I retorted, throwing a red rag to the bull.

My desk was in the middle of the classroom. He walked up to where I stood in a fit of rage, and gave me a big shove, sending me sprawling to the floor between my fellow seated students in front of the whole class. A hushed silence ensued.

I ended up with a few bruises and was scared to go back to school the next day. I stayed home. Call it a mental health day, although that wasn’t a thing in 1968.

The next day, while I was at home, unbeknownst to me, my father turned up at the school, located and gave my teacher a real dressing down, threatening him with what would happen if he ever laid a hand on me again.

Neither my father nor the teacher told me about the visit. The following week, however, when I went to say something in class, my teacher said something like. “Keep your mouth shut, or are you going to send your father back to beat me up?” I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

Anyway, back to ‘Einsteinian Drift.’ One day I was in a weekly leadership training session that we had at the Transport Operations Centre, and one of my colleagues quoted Einstein as having said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” I was pretty sure I had read that he didn’t say that at all.

So I checked it out with my faithful research companion, Google.

A year or so later, when my CEO repeated that same phrase in a management meeting, I blurted out that it wasn’t him.

My reward was a bit of a look which was like, “Why would you say that, Luigi? I was enjoying the discussion and you felt the need to correct me. What was the point? Were you wanting me to look ignorant?”

The conversation ended, and I felt embarrassed. Nobody actually cared whether Einstein really said that or not. Only me. I halted her flow of what was a light-hearted but important conversation. I subsequently apologised to her in passing and she laughed and flicked it off.

Google told me that in “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein,” published by Princeton University Press, the saying falls under the “misattributed” section. The book claimed that Rita Mae Brown’s 1983 book “Sudden Death” was probably the source of the quote.

Another famous misquote that I have often heard, particularly in my early days as a shiny-shoed salesman, was PT Barnum’s (you might know him from The Greatest Showman), “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

It turns out, this was said by Adam Forepaugh, a competing circus owner. In a 1948 newspaper article in the Bridgeport Post, the journalist asked if he could quote Forepaugh attributing it as one of his quotes. Forepaugh apparently responded, "Just say it's one of Barnum's slogans which I am borrowing for the occasion. It sounds more like him than it does me anyway." So that’s where it appears to have come from.

‘Never let the facts get in the way of a good story’, is a journalism maxim, even if it goes against the Journalist Code of Ethics. Something that has been well left behind in news media these days, with disinformation being the flavour of the day with fake news on many fronts.

I still can’t resist correcting people at times, but I’m a bit more circumspect. Being right doesn’t always matter.