Greeting Card Quotation
Quotation as consumer sentiment: short, warm, occasion-fitted, and often loosely attributed.
The greeting card industry is one of the largest commercial users of quotation. Cards need a line that is emotionally legible in three seconds, appropriate to a fixed occasion, and safe for a wide audience.
Those constraints select strongly for a narrow kind of quotation: affirming rather than complex, seasonally generic, and short enough to set at display size. Ambivalence and irony are filtered out at the sourcing stage.
Cards are also a major vector for misattribution. Licensing checks focus on copyright clearance, not on whether the named author actually said the words, which is how anonymous lines acquire famous signatures at scale.
Common mistake: treating a card as a source. A line printed on a card has no provenance information attached, so it cannot support an attribution anywhere else.
“Warm, occasion-appropriate lines printed with a famous signature and no source.”
Keep reading the glossary
A short, motivational line — often quoted, often misattributed — offered as consolation, exhortation, or self-help.
Assigning a quote to the wrong person — the most common error in quotation.
Borrowed words used to sell — with legal, ethical, and reputational strings attached.
The image-plus-quotation-plus-abstract-noun format, and the parody genre it spawned.