Oscar Wilde on Twitter

Announcing a new Twitter bot, @WildeanTweets, that posts verified Oscar Wilde quotations.

Would Oscar Wilde have been a fan of social media? It is tempting to speculate that his finely honed epigrams, if issued today, would set Twitter on fire. It's also possible that his talent for a cutting insult (see virtually any of his poetry reviews) would have seen him labelled a troll. Certainly his exchanges with rival wits, such as Whistler, in the letters pages of various late 19th century magazines would now be perfect kindling for a flame war.

But really, we don't have to imagine how Wilde might have fared in today's fast-paced media landscape. This is because Twitter is littered with legions of Wildean surrogates, each pouring forth pithy sayings and paradoxes attributed to the Lord of Language. These tweets are liked and retweeted with a frequency Wilde would no doubt find gratifying, for, as we all know, "there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

Wilde may, however, be less pleased with the content of the tweets that bear his name, many of which are of dubious provenance. A few minutes' perusal of the #OscarWilde hashtag on Twitter will reveal the usual suspects:

  • Hear no evil, speak no evil—-and you’ll never be invited to a party.
  • Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.
  • Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it's not fine, it's not the end.
  • Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.
  • Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
  • You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.
  • You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
  • It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
  • I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.

Many of the these quotations are very obviously not by Wilde. For example, during Wilde's lifetime, "sex" was only used to refer to gender. A man who died in 1900 is unlikely to have encountered many "fancy cars". And the final quote on this list has been fact-checked by Snopes.com, who found it was uttered not by the Irish playwright but by his near-namesake Olivia Wilde, the American actress, in 2011. In general, Wilde's acerbic tone is missing from these lines, which would better adorn a motivational poster than a biting social satire of the calibre of The Importance of Being Earnest.

In an attempt to fight back against the rising tide of fabricated Oscariana, I have made a bot that tweets verified Oscar Wilde quotations: @WildeanQuotes. You should follow it immediately.

The bot randomly tweets a Wildean bon mot every few hours, drawn from an expanding pool. At present the bot's repertoire includes the society comedies, Personal Impressions of America, and Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young. I am currently working my way through Wilde's reviews, and plan on eventually picking out the best one-liners from the entirety of his complete works. You can follow my progress here.