The Perpetuation of Errors

There are many sites on the internet carrying the lyrics to Lou Reed and John Cale’s “Song for Drella” album. Interestingly it seems that the vast majority of them are wrong.

There’s a wonderful couplet in “Faces and Names”: People who want to meet the name I have / Are always disappointed in me. But almost every site that carries the lyrics has this as “… always disappointed when they meet me”.

Similarly there seem to be many sites that carry the text of the Robert Frost poem “The Road Less Traveled”. Of course, there’s no such poem (that phrase doesn’t even exist in it); the title is actually “The Road Not Taken”.

There’s always a temptation to believe that the better attested to something is, the more likelihood it is to be true. Truth is never that simple.

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