Dean's World

Imprecision quibble:

I doubt that Sagan never said "billions and billions" in his entire televised career because I find it inconceivable that he gave no televised interviews in which he denied saying "billions and billions" in Cosmos. (IIRC the phrase is from Carson's imitation of Sagan)

And had he lived to go on a book tour for his last book, it would've been impossible for Sagan to avoid saying "billions and billions" on TV.

Jody: Okay, well, there are those who knew him personally, including the fact that he was amused but mildly irked about it, but they claim he never said "billions and billions" any time ever. It was just not one of his phrases, and he didn't even like it much, although he would laugh a bit when comedians used it. So it's on you then--find any instance of it.

Martin: Hey that's excellent! I'll quite believe it too. I am an old-school Star Trek geek (check my underwear, I remember watching it when I was 3-4 years old back in the late '60s!) and I don't recall him ever saying it either.

Here's the intersting thing about such iconic lines though: even though the people in question never said them, it seems obvious, intuitive, that they DID say them. As if, those are lines we KNOW they should have said. Or that somehow sum up many other things they said so perfectly we can capture them in a few words.

Its interesting isn't it?

You've all been watching too damned much television for a bunch of grown men. Now all that's left of such a wasteful experience is trivia.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

"Elementary, my dear Watson" wasn't in any of the original Holmes stories or novels by Conan Doyle, but shows up in one of the early movies.

Also, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet and Joe Friday never said "Just the facts, ma'am."

Noel

Dean,

I seem to recall Sagan using it in an SNL skit in which he appeared.

Here's the "Beam me up" story. Kirk came close to saying it in the fourth movie, but didn't quite. I suspect that was an in-joke by the scriptwriters, since the misquotation was so famous among the fans by then.

And speaking of misquotations...

Rosemary: The assertion isn't that Sagan didn't say it in Cosmos (which I think is agreed), but that he had to have said it in other contexts and particularly in response to shooting down the notion that he said "billions and billions" in Cosmos.

A couple comments on the wiki entry. First, the title is wrong. The first chapter (that's a scanned image of the first page from Amazon) of Billions and Billions is entitled "Billions and Billions," though the first line is "I never said it." Second, context immediately after that first line makes it clear that he's referring to never saying it in the Cosmos series.

This context is made explicit in this WaPo interview (actually the second story in the link, but there's not embedded links).

"I never said it at all," he says. "I never said `billions and billions.' When we updated and reconfigured `Cosmos,' I had to go through the whole business and one of the things that I was watching is did I ever say it. And I never did."

Not only that, but he wouldn't say such a thing.

"It's so imprecise. How many is billions and billions? One or two? A hundred?"

However, per my interpretation of Dean's challenge, I can't find a televised instance of Sagan saying it. But I did find interviews, such as the one above, where he said "billions and billions" in just the manner I said he would've had to have said it. So score that as you will.

(Personally I'm cursing YouTube for not existing in the early 80's when he was most likely to have made that denunciation, probably while on the Tonight show with Carson.)

Time for a new "Law":

"Once it becomes known that a quote attributed to a living celebrity is not authentic, the probability of that celebrity intentionally uttering/penning that phrase in order to call attention to the falsehood of the prior attribution approaches certainty. If the celebrity is dead, either a beer commercial or fanfiction will put that phrase in the celebrity's mouth."

Call it The Sagan/Casablanca Principle.

I could swear that I watched an interview with Sagan where he said not "billions and billions," but in explaining how many stars possibly could exist in the universe, he said "millions, perhaps billions OF billions." I remember the remark because I was stunned by the magnitude of "billions OF billions."

Musta been dreamin'.