Recently I ended a column with the quote “I am not young enough to know everything.” As many other people have also done over the years, I attributed the saying to the witty Oscar Wilde. This turned out to be incorrect. While Wilde did in fact write something similar, credit for the line I used should actually have gone to “Peter Pan” creator J. M. Barrie. As another columnist for this paper would say, my shame is great.

On the other hand, the whole thing started me thinking about quotes in general. Not just the misattributions, mind you, but also about all those quotes that are commonly misquoted — and there are many.

The misquote that intrigues me the most has to be the words spoken by Neil Armstrong as he became the first person to set foot on the moon: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” While some people persist in adding “forward” after “leap,” that’s not the case.

The real controversy centers around the letter “a.” Did Armstrong say “one small step for man” or “one small step for a man?” Since “man” and “mankind” both refer to humanity in the quote, it clearly was meant to include the “a.” Otherwise, the statement is, in essence, “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”

Armstrong later said he delivered it with the “a,” contending that the little letter got lost in the garbled radio transmission.

Experts at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum disagree, saying that they’ve listened to the recording of the quote extensively and can’t hear the “a.” So that’s the way the quote appears on a wall of the exhibit displaying the astronaut’s spacesuit, making it more or less official.

Being misquoted seems to be an occupational hazard among the famous. William Shakespeare is frequently misquoted. Take for example “Double, double toil and trouble, which is spoken by the three witches in Macbeth and usually misremembered as “Bubble, bubble toil and trouble.”

When we talk about “blood, sweat and tears,” we’re misquoting Winston Churchill’s line, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

And sometimes a thing called “Churchillian drift” occurs — a term that was coined in 1993 by Nigel Rees for when a quote is intentionally or erroneously attributed to someone famous in an attempt to add intellectual heft to it. An excellent example of this was when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott retweeted a meme claiming Churchill once said, “The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists,” something Churchill did not say.

I’ve always wondered about the time someone telephoned quotable baseball great Yogi Berra at 2 a.m. The caller asked if he was disturbing Berra at such a late hour. There are many reports that the catcher replied, “No, I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”

While Berra probably did say it, researchers have traced the quote back to Lucille Ball’s husband, Desi Arnez, who used the line in 1942. Or maybe it’s just apocryphal.

Even if Berra were still around, asking him about the quote probably wouldn’t clear up the matter. Most likely, you’d just get his famous line “I never said most of the things I said.” And you can quote him on that. (If he actually said it, that is.)

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”