Anatomy of a Fake Quotation
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
When your name becomes a verb that can be applied to your competitors' products, is it good, or is it bad?
Google are still scared of Bing, but I think it has little, if anything, to do with its verbification.
"Tweet" is also too different from "Twitter" to be warrant worries, I think.
Except if you think about MLK's life you'd think "What the hell context would this have been in? Who is this dead 'enemy' who killed 'thousands'?"
The (fake) quote does come across to me as a bit too holier-than-thou. It's a form of cost-free conspicuous po-facedness to which you set your facebook status to mark yourself as being morally superior to the less sophisticated USA-USA chanting crowd. It doesn't sound like the kind of thing MLK would have said, because MLK wasn't all that into "Hey look I'm better than you" type announcements.
There's a scene in Return of the Jedi where the Super Star Destroyer crashes into the Death Star. Everybody else on the bridge cheers, but Admiral Ackbar looks sad and bows his head, acknowleding the awfulness of the loss of life even if they were evil enemies who were trying to kill everyone. The listed quote is propagated by Ackbar wannabees with a George Lucas level view of what being morally sophisticated looks like.
On a side note, your post has a bit of a holier-than-thou feel to it.
On the other hand, as a civilized person I think that actively glorying in the death of an enemy is a bit unseemly. So I felt a bit of quiet satisfaction, made a few pithy comments to mark the occasion, and poured myself a glass of my most expensive whisky.
So basically in answer to the grandparent question: I think the appropriate response is to keep quiet about it. Let other folks express their own feelings about this historic occasion without feeling the need to elevate yourself above them.
But this guy? He killed men, women and children to make a political point. He sacrificed his own, to make his point. He sat back in his mansion, rich and pampered, paying to have people killed.
I admit to a little glorying, to an unseemly degree. Just this once.
The same could be said about thousands of people on both sides of this war. Personally, as long as there are people willing to take his place, I'm not rejoicing one bit.
Consider the strike force on this one: volunteers, entered under enemy fire and Arrested the bodyguards they encountered, found the guy and disabled the young woman guarding him by wounding her in the leg; retreated with his body; had to blow up the disabled helicopter but first Dragged the Enemy Bastard's personal bodyguard to safety(!), then left all while under fire.
There's a word that describes all that, but its not 'terrorism' its...wait...let me think...Heroism! Yeah, that's right.
That shouldn't be a breath of fresh air for me as far as public figures go, but it sadly is.
-Foresterh
"Man is mortal. Socrates is a man, therefor Socrates is mortal."
Most of the Google results credit Woody Allen! :P
I believe the correct author is Aristotle.
Summary: Jessica Dovey, a Facebook user in Japan, wrote the first sentence. She then tacked on an MLK quote. People then treated both her sentence and MLK's sentence as if they were one, continuous MLK quote.
Unless I managed to still misunderstand...