I ran into an interesting problem recently. A student had sent me a draft assignment, and were wanting to know how to format a quote they were planning on using to lead off their assignment with. A nice idea to set the tone!
The quote was:
“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway” – Mary Kay Ash
I started to respond to the student with some information on how to format an “epigraph” – as these things are called – on the APA Style website which has such a good post on epigraphs here (NB: you MUST read all the comments on this post – they are fabulous; APA Style, 2013), but thought it might be best to see if I could find the original quote.
However, it was surprisingly difficult to find anything that looked 'original'. There are lots of repeats of the quote above in poster form. Lots of attributed sayings. But no obvious source material. What I did find was an article suggesting that - according to Chang (2015) - this was said by Ms Ash, at a Mary Kay event in 1970. If we take that as gospel, and in line with the APA Style (2013) advice, I think we could format the epigraph as:
“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway” – Mary Kay Ash, Mary Kay Cosmetics Seminar (Chang, 2015).
It is probably important to mention here that Chang notes their concerned about the validity of the story content, stating that there has "been NO physicist, scientists, or aerodynamicist that ever claimed bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly. Folklorists and historians have been trying to track down this myth for decades" to no avail (2015). Apparently the bumblebee had gone unstudied by biologists until 1970; and engineers probably had never even considered it. The story is apocryphal, created to encourage women to sell, sell, sell Mary Kay cosmetics, in order to earn a diamond bee brooch (a Mary Kay bumblebee "pin" is shown illustrating this post).
OK. So a trip to the Internet Archive was in order. Here I found that the bumblebee story is told in Ms Ash's book, and the quote - as listed above - does not match the book (Ash, 1994). What was said in the book was:
“years ago, aerodynamic engineers studied this creature [the bumblebee] and decided that it simply should not be able to fly! Its wings are too weak and its body too heavy for flight. Everything seems to tell the bumblebee, 'You'll never get off the ground.' But I like to think that maybe—just maybe—our Divine Creator whispered, 'You can do it!' so it did!” (p. 10)
While the two stories are similar, they do not match. It appears that the Chang (2013) version has been significantly polished and edited. We cannot as yet determine whether that editing can be attributed to Ash.
I advised the student to use the one in the book and cite Ash (1994) directly in the epigraph. While they could use the original and list it as "attributed to Mary Kay Ash" and cite Chang (2015), it is not really good form to do so, as we are now aware that the quote may have been edited by an unknown hand.
Sam
References:
APA Style. (2013). How to format an epigraph. https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2013/10/how-to-format-an-epigraph.html
Ash, M. K. (1994). Mary Kay: The success story of America's most dynamic businesswoman (3rd ed.). HarperCollins Publishers.
Chang, K. (2015, October 31). incorporated the Bumblebee Myth into company culture. Medium. https://medium.com/@kschang77/mlm-myth-how-mary-kay-ash-incorporated-the-bumblebee-myth-into-company-culture-e5ede3e27c37
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