“Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.”

Transcript: Political quotes in everyday speech

Mae McCreary: Well, politicians are people, too, and people make mistakes. In issue 8 of Spotlight, our language feature is all about quotes from politicians. Some are serious and have even become idiomatic expressions that we use in our everyday lives, and some are just hilariouszum Totlachenhilarious.

Owen Connors: Can you give an example?

MM: I could, but I actually had a really great conversation on this subject with our colleagues Lorraine Turner Akcakaya, who’s an editor at Spotlight, and Richard Mote, who’s an editor at Business Spotlight. So why don’t we just give that a listen?

MM: Earlier, I was on the Wikipedia page for “Bushisms”, which I hadn’t previously known about, and I was having a really have a hard timeMühe habenhard time keep it togethersich zusammenreißenkeeping it together in the office because George W. Bush had some really incredible quotes.

Richard Mote: A lot of them were very funny, I remember.

MM: Yes! My favourite was, “Fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.” And he said this in Nashville, Tennessee on September 17th in 2002. And he was trying to quote an old proverbSpruch, Sprichwortproverb that goes, “Fool me, once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”, meaning after being trickedbetrogentricked once, you should learn from your mistake. But the way Bush said it, it makes absolutely no sense.

Lorraine Turner Akcakaya: That’s really good.

RM: He also said the French had no word for entrepreneur (frz.)Unternehmer(in)entrepreneur, didn’t he?

MM: Yeah, the US doesn’t have a great record(Vor)Geschichte, Rufrecord of presidents saying very intelligent things in office, and I think Trump probably take the cake (US ifml.)den Vogel abschießentakes the cake for that one, but what about the UK?

LTA: Well, I am going to talk about “economical with the truth”. Now this phrase was coin sth.etw. prägencoined by the cabinet secretaryKabinettsekretär(in)cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong. He was in Margaret Thatcher’s government. He was basically the highest civil servantRegierungsbeamter, -beamtincivil servant, and this really was his claim to fameAnspruch auf Berühmtheitclaim to fame. I actually read his obituaryNachrufobituary from 2020, and it was the first thing they mentioned. It was to do with the Spycatcher trialProzesstrial in the ’80s, where the British government tried to ban sth.etw. verbietenban a memoirMemoirenmemoir written by a former MI5 (Military Intelligence section 5)britischer Inlandsgeheimdienst, SpionageabwehrdienstMI5 spy. They managed to do this in the UK, but in Australia, they obviously said, “No, we’re not going to accept this”. So, it went to court and in court, it came out where Robert Armstrong said he was lying. Instead of saying he was lying, he said he’d been “economical with the truth”. This is literallybuchstäblichliterally his claim to fame, and it’s become a very well-known, well-used phrase really highlighting, basically it’s a way of admitting that you’d lied.

MM: I love that. I’m going to start using that.

LTA: Have you ever heard it before?

MM: No, I haven’t.

LTA: Ah, OK. Richard?

RM: Yes, I’ve heard this before. I think it’s sort of when you don’t tell everything. So, you only tell the things you want to tell and you omit sth.etw. weglassenomit…

LTA: It’s omission, isn’t it? Lying by omissionWeglassen, Unterlassungomission. 

MM:  Richard, what about Australian politicians?

RM: We have plenty of politicians and they have a lot of colourful banterWortgeplänkelbanter among each other and phrases. The famous one that I remember was, although it’s a little before my time, I was still a child, the end of the 1970s when Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. It was kind of a tough time because you had relatively high inflation and high unemployment and times weren’t great. And Malcolm Fraser is famous for simply saying, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy”. So, it’s kind of refreshingerfrischendrefreshing now because now we have populists who will promise you anything.

MM: Right.

LTA: That brutal honesty, how did it, how did it go downhier: ankommengo down?

RM: Surprisingly well, I think. He is, I mean, he was remembered as quite a successful prime minister. Although when the ’80s came, times changed completely, you know, economic growth took off and he was seen as a bit of a dinosaur, a bit an old-fashioned guy then. But at the time, it was kind of the perfect phrase for the times.