Putting Words In Other Peoples’ Mouths

The United States Postal Service is unveiling a stamp Tuesday morning honoring the late author Maya Angelou. The stamp features the quote, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” Unfortunately, it turns out Angelou didn’t write that, children’s book author Joan Walsh Anglund did in 1967 in her book, A Cup of Sun. When he heard, Mark Saunders of the USPS responded by sending a link to a 2013 blog post interview that quoted Angelou saying the phrase and later said he found “numerous references” that attributed it to Angelou. Snopes probably wasn’t one of them. The USPS says it’s not going to pull the limited edition stamp but may re-release it with a different famous Angelou quote, “Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam-I-am.”

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