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Comment by stepstop | Hacker News Reader

I have fallen into some incredible quotation-source searching a few times, spending hours looking through old scans of documents that only exist in archives. But when I think I find the original author, I'm astounded how some people can prove that even those are a paraphrase of a more ancient example. And then you have sites like https://quoteinvestigator.com/

What are some of the tricks in quotation investigation?

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Isn't it possible that quotes have simply been rediscovered many times?

There are billions of people on earth, and we all have witty things to say. And inspirational quotes don't carry much information, so many people are bound to say the same thing, especially if you consider the meaning instead of the literal formulation.

The same thing happens with jokes, especially puns. For example, try making a joke on someone's name. Even if you just made it up, there is a high chance that the person in question have already heard it.

> there is a high chance that the person in question have already heard it.

This is so true. I speak as someone whose name prompts an obvious joke. People think they are so clever and witty, having come up with something I have heard hundreds of times before.

A simple example for this is all the equivalent proverbs that exist in different languages which are not translations of one another.

Edit: an example is "venturing into the lion's den" in Spanish is "falling into the wolf's mouth" (Ir a caer en la boca del lobo).

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