Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Wednesday Search Challenge (Dec 22, 2010): Finding a quotation... even when it's not quite right

One of the biggest problems I see with people searching is when they're convinced that they already know the answer, or at least enough of it to do a search, certain that everything is correct.  They get surprised when things don't turn out the way they thought.  

A while back I was searching for the rest of the poem that contains the line "...the best laid plans of mice and men oft-times go awry..."

I knew that was the line I wanted to find, and I even had a suspicion that the poet was Scottish.

So here's the challenge for today: 

What WAS the original poem?  And, just as important, what is the rest of the stanza in which this line appears?    

Search on! 


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4 comments:

  1. HansDecember 22, 2010 at 9:35 AM

    Daniel, I don't know if it was just pure luck or skills, but I found the complete poem within a few clicks.

    First I highlighted the phrase [best laid plans of mice and men oft-times] and with a right click of the mouse the first Google result brought me to: http://www.quotelady.com/subjects/plan.html

    I could read there that this wasn’t a correct quote, but that it comes from a poem of Robert Burns: “To a Mouse”. Again using Google [Robert Burns "To a Mouse"] brought me to the complete poem at: http://www.electricscotland.com/burns/mouse.html

    The rest of the stanza in which the misquoted line appears:
    But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
    In proving foresight may be vain:
    The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
    Gang aft agley,
    An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
    For promis'd joy

    For a standard English translation and more background information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Mouse

    Greetings from the Netherlands,
    Hans

    ReplyDelete
  2. krossbowDecember 22, 2010 at 10:22 AM

    I started with your line [the best laid plans of mice and men oft-times go awry] but left off the quotation marks figuring that if you were so sure about the phrase that there was something wrong with that exact phrase. The results for the above search proved that there were others who also thought that was the phrase.

    The sixth result down showed a different but similar phrase (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go oft awry.) on a Wikipedia entry about Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
    https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men

    The entry mentions that "Of Mice and Men" comes from a phrase in the poem "To A Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough" by Robert Burns dated 1785.
    https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/To_a_Mouse

    The rest of the stanza as stated there is:
    But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
    In proving foresight may be vain:
    The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
    Gang aft agley,
    An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
    For promis'd joy!

    ReplyDelete
  3. simoneDecember 22, 2010 at 10:36 AM

    i found a similar issue when forward thinking what will happen if a search engine starts saying what's true and what's false in our lives (http://www.harrr.org/rrr/extended-did-you-mean/ )

    ReplyDelete
  4. jppDecember 22, 2010 at 11:27 AM

    To A Mouse
    By Robert Burns 25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796)
    Indeed Scottish!
    [..]
    But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
    In proving foresight may be vain:
    The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
    Gang aft agley,
    An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
    For promis'd joy!
    [..]
    http://www.electricscotland.com/burns/mouse.html

    Regards

    jpp

    ReplyDelete

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