There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.

You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.

You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.

There are vast archives of printed material to help you.

The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.

Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.

Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.

Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.

Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.

Open up your calendar app. Scroll back to February 2024. What date was 17 February 2024? Saturday. Not Monday.

Now, OK, maybe at 95 she's forgotten her birthday. What else does the rest of the piece say?

In 1968, Patricia Routledge won Best Actress (Musical) at the Tony Awards - she was 39. I don't know if I'd consider appearing on Broadway as provincial stages.

Keeping Up Appearances was first broadcast in 1990. Patricia was around 60, not 50, when she was cast.

While she may have thought it would only be a small series - even though it was by the creator of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine - there's no way that being the lead character could be described as a "small part". She wasn't a breakout character - she was the star.

Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but it does list lots of her stage work. She was working steadily on stage from 1999 - when she hit 70 - but none of it Shakespeare.

I was able to do that fact checking in 10 minutes while laying in bed waiting for the bathroom to become free. It wasn't onerous. It didn't require subscriptions to professional journals. I didn't need a team of fact-checkers. It took a bit of web-sleuthing and, dare I say it, a smidgen of common sense.

And yet, a couple of newspapers ran with this utter drivel as though it were the truth. The Independent published it as part of their tribute - although they took the piece down after I emailed them. Similarly The Express ran it without any basic fact-checking (and didn't take it down after being contacted).

Both of them say their primary source is the "Jay Speak" blog. There's nothing on that blog post to say that the author interviewed Patricia Routledge. A quick check of the other posts on the site don't make it obvious that it is a reputable source of exclusive interviews with notable actors.

The date on that blog post is August 2nd, 2025. Is there anything earlier? Typing a few of the phrases into a search engine found a bunch of posts which pre-date it. The earliest I can find was this Instagram post and this Facebook post both from the 24th of July - a week early than the Jay Speaks post.

To be clear, I don't think Jay Speaks was deliberately trying to fool journalists or hoax anyone. They simply saw an interesting looking post and re-shared it. I also suspect the Facebook and Instagram posts were copied from other sources - but I've been unable to find anything definitive.

I would expect that professional journalists at well-established newspapers to be able to call an actor's agent to fact-check a piece before running it. If they can't, I would have thought they'd do a cursory fact check.

But, no. I presume the rush to publish is so great that it over-rides any sense of whether a piece should be accurate.

This is irresponsible. Last week saw the BBC air an outright lie on Have I Got News For You. A professional TV company, with a budget for lawyers, fact checkers, and researchers - and they just broadcast easily disproven lies. Why? Maybe hubris, maybe laziness, maybe deliberate rabble-rousing.

The media have comprehensively failed us. They will repeat any tawdry nonsense as long as it keeps people clicking. It's up to us to defend ourselves and our friends against this unending tsunami of low-grade slurry.

I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. It doesn't require anything more than an Internet connection and a curious mind. If you see something online, take a moment to check it before sharing it.

Stopping misinformation starts with you.

She was the youngest and first woman to receive a British House of Commons Shield.

That sounds like a fantastic achievement! But, and I hate to bring fact-checking to an argument, what is it?

Looking around the web, I could only find three mentions of this no-doubt prestigious award.

1. A newspaper clipping of a puff-piece which made the same claim about the same person.
2. Reference to shields which are erected in memory to MPs who were killed in service.
3. A religious leader who claimed to have received the same award.

If this is a well-regarded way to recognise and honour people, shouldn't there be more about it online? But, perhaps, not everything to do with our democracy is available on the web. To the FOI machine, Robin!

I wrote to the House of Commons to see if they could shed some light on the matter.

As ever, their Freedom of Information team wrote back quickly:

In the first instance, please note that we are not aware of a “House of Commons Shield” award, and this is not something supplied by or handled the House of Commons Administration. However, from publicly available resources our understanding is that this was an award which has been supplied in the past, and we believe this may have been handled by individual MPs themselves as opposed to the House Administration. We have therefore checked with the following teams within the House Administration to see if they held any information within the scope of your request:

• The Speaker’s Office, who hold details of official awards provided by the House Administration, as well as those nominated for formal Honours.
• It is possible that these awards were provided by at a sponsored event organised by MPs, so we have checked with the House’s Events’ team on this.
• It is also possible that these awards were provided at room bookings made by MPs, so we have checked with the House’s Access & Services team on this also.

However, these teams have confirmed that they do not hold any information regarding this award. We therefore hold no information within the scope of your request.

They suggested that I contact any MPs who might have handed out the award. There was only one (former) MP I could find so I dropped them a polite email asking WTAF was going on.

Please can help me solve a small mystery? I'm trying to find out more information about an award called "The House of Commons Shield".

I understand that you presented the award to [redacted] in 2009. I'd like to understand a little more about what the award is.

The House of Commons have told me that this isn't an official award as such and they suggested I contact MPs who may have presented it.

A few people claim to have been given this award but you are the only named person I can find who has presented it.

Is "The House of Commons Shield" a specific award that MPs can present? Is it a recognised term? Are there any criteria used when judging who should get it? Or is it a piece of memorabilia which has been mistakenly claimed as an official trophy?

Any assistance in figuring this out would be gratefully received.

Sadly - but predictably - they elected not to enter into correspondence with me.

If you have any information about what the "House of Commons Shield" award is - please drop a note in the comments.

I've seen this quote flying around social media for some time.

Everyone loves finding out that a famous quote has a twist and that the author isn't anonymous. It's the perfect piece of clickbait!

But the thing is… this quote is bunkum.

The easiest way to tell is to stick it into a search engine. You'll find lots of people confidently claiming it is by Wilde - but no actual sources. Try it now. Surely at some point someone would have pointed to the scene in a play, or some private correspondence, or a passage from a book, wouldn't they? But there's nothing. Just a lot of unsourced claims.

Wilde isn't an obscure writer. All of his work has been digitised and is easily searchable. As far as I can tell, this "quote" doesn't appear anywhere.

So who did say it? And who attributed it to Oscar Wilde?

The phrase "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" has a long history. In its modern form, it can be attributed to Charles Caleb Colton who published it in a book of aphorisms in 1820. That's 34 years before Oscar Wilde was born.

But what about "that mediocrity can pay to greatness"? The earliest example of that 2nd half comes from 1893, in "Notices of the proceedings at the meetings of the members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain with abstracts of the discourses - Volume XIV". That was published in 1896.

Here it is in the essay "The Imaginative Faculty" by Sir Herbert Beerbohm.

Admittedly, that was published during Wilde's life. And, in 1892, Beerbohn produced and stared in Wilde's A Woman of No Importance. Nevertheless, the phrase isn't found in that play - nor in any of his earlier works that I can see.

In 1898, the phrase was also used by "Abbott" when memorialising the racist and misogynist hate-preacher "Brann":

It pops up again in 1918 with Georg Brandes writing "A great writer has said: Detraction is the only tribute, which mediocrity can pay to the great.".

The combining of the two phrases doesn't seem to appear online or in archived works until - as far as I can see - October 2nd 2012.

Using Twitter's date-based search I found a now-defunct lifestyle magazine with the full quote - albeit unattributed. A few days later, someone quotes a now-private account which attributes it to Wilde.

A year or so earlier, in 2011, a Juventus Football fan posted this proto-version of the phrase:

The Origin?

But, perhaps there is a little truth in the quote.

In 1882, Oscar Wilde gave a lecture - "The English Renaissance of Art" - in New York City. During which, he said:

Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius

A version of which can be seen (in very low fidelity) in the New York Tribune, January 10th 1882:

A few months later, he signed an autograph with the slightly more pithy:

Satire is the homage which mediocrity pays to genius.

Sadly, it does not appear to have been an original bon mote.

Going back even further

A year before, in 1881, the Michigan Medical News published a column saying:

Perhaps Wilde was unlikely to be reading medical journals. But there are earlier publications

In 1872, a list of sayings was attributed to the American judge Frederick Grimke:

Even earlier is this entry from The Dublin Magazine from 1842:

That's a good decade before Oscar Wilde was born. It is possible that, as he was born and grew up in Dublin, the phrase was in common parlance then.

So what have we learned?

Everyone loves a cool quote. And people feel smart when they are told a "hidden truth" behind it. It's the same thing that lights up the brains of conspiracy theorists; there's a second meaning which the world doesn't know but has been revealed to you.

But this, it turns out, is not by Oscar Wilde. Both halves of the quote pre-dates him by several decades. The quote that Wilde did give is about satire, rather than imitation. And even that wasn't original.

But the Internet is a machine which mercilessly mingles quotes until a new meme was born.

"I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."

World of Engineering

@engineers_feed

Nikola Tesla's last message to his mother: "All these years that I had spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation." pic.x.com/OmfbsC5GHR

---

But what's the source of it?

The most prominent source appears to be this article from March 2015 in Telegraf.rs. It is a series of letters purportedly written by Tesla to his mother just before she died. It contains the quote:

All these years I have spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation

But what's this at the bottom of the article?

Hmm... So, where did they get it from?

The only earlier work I've found for these letters is a post from January 2015 on the blog "SINESTETIČKI IMAGINARIUM".

The blog appears to mostly be poetry and other creative writing. The post claims to be the "first English translation of the last letter of Nikola Tesla". It contains such entries as:

Sunday the 22nd of November

This letter you will never receive, mother. I do not know why I am writing to you, the one who can never ever read this.

Rest in peace mother, and do forgive me that my roads brought me so far away from you that I cannot even come to your funeral.

I am reading the telegraph with the news of you passing away and I despise people who were not ready even two years ago to realise that electricity can be transmitted wireless. Now they saw it can be done but still they will not be able to use it for centuries, because someone has burned to the ground my laboratory in the centre of the town, with all my records and technical drawings.

There are a few problems with this.

The first wrinkle is that Tesla's mother, Đuka Mandić, died in 1892. The letters start on Wednesday 18th November. Which was a Friday.

(Although, as pointed out by Patrick Smears, Tesla's mother died in Croatia - which was still on the Julian Calendar. So, for her, it would have been a Wednesday.)

Most sources seem to agree that she died in April 1892. With Tesla travelling from America to Europe when he heard of her illness.

There's also the matter of the lab fire. Tesla's lab burned down in 1895 - 3 years after this supposed letter.

The book "Nikola Tesla, Correspondence with Relatives" published by the Tesla Memorial Society contains some of his surviving letters. The index of letters only has a few in 1892. None appear to be to his mother.

In his autobiography, Tesla says of the spring of 1892:

Imagine the pain and distress I felt when it flashed upon my mind that a dispatch was handed to me at that very moment bearing the sad news that my mother was dying. I remembered how I made the long journey home without an hour of rest and how she passed away after weeks of agony!

Later in the same book, he says:

But only once in the course of my existence have I had an experience which momentarily impressed me as supernatural. It was at the time of my mother’s death. I had become completely exhausted by pain and long vigilance, and one night was carried to a building about two blocks from our home. As I lay helpless there, I thought that if my mother died while I was away from her bedside she would surely give me a sign.

Two or three months before I was in London in company with my late friend, Sir William Crookes, when spiritualism was discussed, and I was under the full sway of these thoughts.

I reflected that the conditions for a look into the beyond were most favorable, for my mother was a woman of genius and particularly excelling in the powers of intuition. During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy, but nothing happened until early in the morning, when I fell in a sleep, or perhaps a swoon, and saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother.

The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant a certitude, which no words can express, came upon me that my mother had just died. And that was true.

When I recovered I sought for a long time the external cause of this strange manifestation and, to my great relief, I succeeded after many months of fruitless effort. I had seen the painting of a celebrated artist, representing allegorically one of the seasons in the form of a cloud with a group of angels which seemed to actually float in the air, and this had struck me forcefully. It was exactly the same that appeared in my dream, with the exception of my mother’s likeness.

The music came from the choir in the church nearby at the early mass of Easter morning, explaining everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts.

I think this is fairly conclusive. Tesla had been lecturing in London in February 1892. A few months after that, he was with his mother in Easter. The Tesla Museum says:

Learning that his mother was close to death, he arrived in Gospic on April 15, just in time to say goodbye to the person he loved most of all.

After she died, he visited Zagreb in May 1892.

While we can never know how Tesla felt towards the end of his life, I think we can safely say that this "letter" couldn't have been written in November and is most likely a work of fiction. The "quote" is probably complete bunkum.

In a recent article, the BBC described Christine Lagarde thusly:

The role is likely to test the silver-haired 63-year-old, who has admitted before that she lacks economic experience.

The commentator was disgusted that she'd be described as "silver-haired". He wondered out loud "I bet the BBC don't refer to men in this way!"

Luckily, we can test that claim by searching BBC news for that phrase. Here's what I found (restricting myself to stories where the reporter described the subject as "silver-haired", and where the subject was a prominent figure.)

As you can see - the majority of the first 20 results are male. Lagarde is unique in being mentioned twice.

But don't just take my word for it! Run the search yourself and see.

Now, there are some obvious caveats. The BBC (probably) runs more stories about men than women - so the small number of women may be disproportionately targetted. The BBC's search engine doesn't let you specify the order of results - so I may have missed some stories.

I also didn't check whether it was male or female reporters who used the term. Feel free to explore that yourself.

The commentator quickly apologised and deleted his Tweet before it had hit peak virality in its outrage.

All that said, there are lots of outdated and weird sexist tropes that infect the media. Women are often described in a way that a man wouldn't me. Men are rarely "leggy blonds" or "ditzy". They never have "ample curves" or "flawless skin and dazzling eyes".

Language matters. When we reduce people to their mere looks, we do them a disservice. Reporters should avoid these cliches like the plague.

But... We live online. It's up to you to fact check your own assumptions.