Atiku incorrect on George Bernard Shaw’s quote on “two nations divided by a common language”
While congratulating Joe Biden following his inauguration on Wednesday as the 46th U.S. president, former Nigeria’s vice president Atiku Abubakar quoted George Bernard Shaw to ask for a better relationship between Nigeria and U.S.
“As the playwright, George Bernard Shaw once said, America and Nigeria are two nations divided by a common language,” Atiku tweeted.
“And millions of Nigerians and I wish to see that relationship sustained to the mutual benefit of both our democratic nations,” he added.
While the quote has been widely attributed to Shaw, the quote was never written as “America and Nigeria are two nations divided by a common language.”
But while the premise might be true, Atiku was wrong to have reworked the quote and directly credited it to Shaw.
In fact, there are queries of who the original quote two nations divided by a common language” should be attributed to.
The quote has been attributed to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and even Winston Churchill.
In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’. However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, but without giving a source. The quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Reader’s Digest in November 1942.
In 1923 “The New York Times” presented a humorous remark attributed to Shaw about sharing a language. This joke differed from the one being traced.
At the Pilgrims’ Dinner in London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Baldwin, remarked that “the fact that we speak a common language” is really sometimes a hindrance to good relations between Great Britain and America. He may have been vaguely recalling what Bernard Shaw once said, that the use of a common language merely enabled England and America to understand the “insults” offered by the representatives of one to those of the other.
