Painting vs. gilding the lily

[nancylebov]

I'm currently in a discussion in rec.arts.sf.written about whether it's important to say "painting the lily" (the actual Shakespeare quote) rather than the more common (in both senses) "gilding the lily".

Do you care whether people use the original quote? Have you ever been around people who did?

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

It depends on if you want to be pedantic or understood.

If you're quoting Shakespeare, then use it properly. If you're making a reference to doing something un-needed, I'd go with the common (if wrong) reference.

[fixx.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the two sayings necessarily mean the same thing. Whereas "gilding they lilly" says "trying to make the lilly more beautiful" when it is not necessary, where as "painting the lilly" I might interpret as trying to replicate the beauty of a lilly by painting a portrait of it, whether or not that was shakespeare's intent.

Let us not forget that the meaning is probably also lost in translation from English to other languages and that we as Americans don't actually speak English anyway. Recently I was having a loosely related discussion regarding English language, vs American, vs AIM and by that I refer to the abbreviations you find in IM's like 4 for "for" and U for YOU and Tonite for Tonight etc.

I argued that it is difficult for me to debate what I still consider to be "understandable" language when we as Americans don't even speak "Proper" English anyway.

I should add that growing up I commuted between the US and England and frequently lost points on spelling tests for using the British spellings of words... worse yet, one year in the US I had an English teacher who was from England and for the first 3 months of that year I got really good scores on spelling tests, until one or more parents got on her case about marking their kids spellings as wrong.