One of the most memorable lines in all movie history was actually never said. "There's a bit in The Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West says 'Fly, my pretties, fly' to the flying monkeys. Everyone remembers that line. It's not there." Mark Forsyth explains how this misquote came about: Mark: "She says at one point, 'Fly, fly, fly, fly.' She never says 'Fly, my pretties, fly.' But we all remember it as that, because diacope is such a powerful figure of rhetoric that we change it." David: "What you are saying is that our minds have memory receptors in certain shapes. If you want something to be memorable, there are these little rhetorical tactics that shape our words and ideas so that they fit into the slot of the human brain." Mark: "That's exactly it."

"Yesterday" is one of The Beatles' legendary songs. But you've probably haven't noticed what the song is doing. Mark Forsyth breaks it down: "John Lennon complained about that song, because it was written by Paul McCartney. But John complained that the song goes nowhere. And it's true that it goes nowhere." "The first verse begins with the word yesterday and ends with the word yesterday. And then the second verse does exactly the same thing with suddenly: 'Suddenly, there's a shadow hanging over me. I'm not half the man I used to be. Oh, yesterday came suddenly.' And then the third verse does the same thing with yesterday again." "It's very much a song about somebody being stuck in the same place. He starts on yesterday, finishes on yesterday. He starts on suddenly, finishes on suddenly. He doesn't get anywhere." David: "Through aesthetics, you can communicate something that enhances the words you're trying to say. You could say words about being stuck and you can show the stuckness by going from yesterday, to suddenly, back to yesterday. The circle closes where it began." @Inkyfool

What if we are making poetry more complicated than it is? After all, Shakespeare wrote for the masses: "People think you have to have a degree in English in order to understand poetry. Shakespeare wasn't writing for people with degrees in English, because degrees in English didn't exist." "He was writing for a mass market who wanted to hear that beautiful sound. The Globe Theatre could take 3,000 people. The population of London at the time was 200,000. If you scale that up for today, the equivalent Globe would be a 150,000-seater stadium. And Shakespeare had to fill that every day." "Tickets cost the same price as a loaf of bread. You had people from the underclass right up to the top of society, and they were all there to enjoy Shakespeare." "You can't understand every word of Shakespeare unless you've got the text in front of you. That's ok. Just let it flow over you. You don't need to understand everything." - Mark Forsyth (@Inkyfool)

"Poetry has a problem these days: it gets ruined in school." "People think of a poem as something you have to write an essay about, and the essay has to say something about how the poem doesn't mean what it appears to mean." "They're taken out of context, and you don't see them as they were meant to be." Mark Forsyth, author of Rhyme & Reason, explains with a song everyone knows: "Imagine a music professor in 200 years' time who has perfect pitch and can tell you every musical thing about the song Twist and Shout. Now, think about our attitude to Twist and Shout. It's the song where, when it comes on at a party, you turn it up. Everyone dances." "We know Twist and Shout better than that professor will ever know it. You can analyze something to hell and back, but if you don't know where it belongs in a culture, you don't know it. Twist and Shout belongs being played loud at a party." – @Inkyfool