From Fresh Air, on National Public Radio
The Enduring Legacy Of Jane Austen's 'Truth Universally Acknowledged'
By Geoff Nunberg
Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a ranked list of the most frequently highlighted passages across all the books. It's not there anymore, but when I first looked at the list in 2013, the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice was in third place....
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
We can argue about whether that's the most famous first line in English literature.... But there's no other opening sentence that lends itself so well to sampling, mash-ups and adaptation....
Geoff Nunberg is a linguist at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
