Not-so-familiar quotations

READER PHIL MCGEE of Westford recently went looking for the origin of ''gilding the lily," he e-mailed earlier this month, and he was surprised by what he unearthed in Shakespeare. ''To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... Is wasteful and ridiculous excess," is the phrasing in ''King John." ''Can it be that whenever we say 'gilding the lily' we're just misquoting Shakespeare?" McGee asked.

It sure can. The abbreviated form ''gild the lily" has been in circulation for some 200 years, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, though it competed with ''paint the lily" well into the 20th century. In recent decades, ''gild the lily" has been the decisive winner in everyday, non-Shakespearean contexts, but ''paint the lily" seems to have put up a fight.

In Randall Jarrell's 1954 novel ''Pictures From an Institution," for instance, the quotation question is used to mock the character Gertrude Johnson, generally taken to be based on Mary McCarthy. ''She was contemptuous of people who said to paint the lily--just as she was contemptuous, in a different way, of people who said to gild the lily," wrote Jarrell. But she had to say ''paint the lily," because ''she couldn't bear to have anyone think that she didn't know which one it really was."

And William Safire, in a 1987 ''On Language" column, recalled that his first usage fight ever, back in the 1940s, had been over ''gild the lily," then banned as inaccurate at the newspaper where he worked. For the next 40 years, he said, ''I never again used the phrase." But popular usage has won the day: The current New York Times stylebook calls ''gild the lily" ''an accepted phrase for overembellishment," though it adds that ''writers who wish to delight the exacting reader will use Shakespeare's actual words."

Even an exacting reader, however, might admit that ''gild the lily" has some advantages. The pocket-sized version is euphonious, in an advertising-jingle way; it retains the sense of the original; and unlike ''paint the lily," which might mean ''make a picture of the lily," it's unambiguous. (Paint the lily was probably more resonant, too, in Shakespeare's time, when paint meant ''use cosmetics" as well as ''beautify, decorate.")

The vaguely Shakespearean sticking point is a similar case. It was probably influenced by Lady Macbeth's ''screw your courage to the sticking-place," but the original sense--likely a reference to ''the screwing-up of the peg of a musical instrument," according to the Oxford English Dictionary--is no part of the new usage. A sticking point today is just the spot at which a process gets stuck, and no Shakespearean allusion is intended.

Shakespeare suffers worse misrepresentations than these, of course. But is he really ''history's most misquoted figure," as Ralph Keyes speculates in his 1992 book, ''Nice Guys Finish Seventh"? Keyes explores a jungle of misquotation, misattribution (willful and accidental), and collective editing--a process that rips quotes out of context, strips them from their rightful authors, and repeats misinformation till even Bartlett's mistakes it for truth. But his expose of the quotation sausage factory left me thinking that compared to some other notable quotables, Shakespeare has done pretty well.

Many Shakespearean ''misquotations," after all, involve quite minor changes. Queen Gertrude's ''The lady doth protest too much, methinks" often has ''Methinks" as the first word (the better to signal the quotation, no doubt); Hamlet's ''Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio" becomes a more general ''I knew him well"; ''All that glisters is not gold"--Shakespeare's version of an already well-worn proverb--merely drops an archaic verb in favor of the synonym ''glitters."

''Now is the winter of our discontent" is often counted as misquotation, since the rest of the sentence--''made glorious summer by this sun of York"--reveals a different sense and syntax. But as a casual reference to a typical New England winter, the phrase is more riff than reference; like ''gilding the lily," it doesn't intend to borrow a Shakespearean context, but merely recycles a few good words. Shakespeare, himself an adept at what we now call sampling, probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.

A few misquotations, it's true, warp the Shakespearean sense. Hamlet said ''to the manner born," not ''manor"; his ''more honored in the breach" means ''better not done at all," not ''rarely done." And nobody should escape junior high under the delusion that ''Wherefore art thou Romeo?" means ''Where are you?" rather than ''Why?"

But overall, Shakespeare's band of loyal guardians and the wealth of the textual evidence have kept his quotation legacy in good shape. You want the straight dope from the Bard? As Casey Stengel really did say, you could look it up.

E-mail freeman@globe.com.