You know history’s famous quotes — but do you understand them?

You know history’s famous quotes — but do you understand them? View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed You know history’s famous quotes — but do you understand them? Eli Bernstein’s new book reveals language’s strange power through some of history’s best-remembered quotes.

Marie Antoinette was done dirty. No, that’s not a reference to her beheading at the zealous whims of French revolutionaries. Decapitation by guillotine is over in an instant.

Slander, on the other hand, lasts for centuries. As dissidents successfully roiled public fervor against the aristocracy in the late-18th century, they launched a libelous campaign against their well-known queen. Antoinette was defamed as an Austrian spy, a libertine, and a spendthrift — in essence, the worst version of a wealthy, uncaring hussy.

The kind of woman who, when told that the peasants had no bread, would flippantly reply, “Let them eat cake.” But as we are enlightened in Eli Burnstein’s new book, _Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations_, Antoinette never said any such thing. As he writes, “Maria Antonia Josepha, a politically powerless woman sent to the guillotine at age thirty-seven, was one of the Revolution’s greatest scapegoats.” Burnstein, a Canadian humorist based in the U.K., did not set out solely to correct the record on some of history’s most famous phrases — though he does do plenty of that. For example, Robert Frost never advocated for “the road less travelled,” nor did he take it himself.

He only _told_ himself he did. Paul the Apostle never said “money is the root of all evil.” He said the “love of money” is. Oh, and “don’t mess with Texas” didn’t originate as the tough-guy catchphrase it has morphed into.

It was originally an anti-littering slogan. In bite-sized yet wholly satisfying chapters, Burstein explains those famous quotations we often encounter but rarely interrogate intellectually. In essence, we are his guests on a tour of a literary art gallery.