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- LONDON (Reuters) - A murderer, a British king and a last message from
the doomed Titanic all make the list of the most famous ``last words''
of the 20th century, according to the new Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
published on Thursday. ``Bugger Bognor,'' so the story goes, was King George
V's deathbed response in 1936 to the suggestion that he might return to
the seaside resort where he had previously recuperated. Convicted killer
Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed in the United States after the
death penalty was reinstituted in the 1970s, insisted he be put to death
by firing squad.
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- He hastened his demise with the last
words: ``Let's do it.'' The Titanic, the ``unsinkable'' ship that went
down in 1912, has hardly been out of the news since the release of the
blockbuster Hollywood movie. It produced this last signal: ``We are putting
passengers off in small boats...Engine room getting flooded.'' The dictionary
trawled its database of newspapers, magazines, books and the airwaves to
find the quotes repeated the most often. It also surfed the Internet to
see which quotations have become firmly embedded in the public consciousness.
Nigerian minority rights leader Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged by the Nigerian government,
also figured highly in the list of 19 famous last phrases as did U.S. counter-culture
hero Timothy Leary and Captain Laurence Oates.
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- Oates, part of a British expedition racing
to be first to the South Pole the same year as the Titanic hit an iceberg,
realised he was weak and hindering the team. ``I am just going outside
and may be some time,'' he said, crawling outside the tent into the snow,
never to be seen again. None of Captain Robert Scott's team made it back
alive. The dictionary also delved into the top newspaper headlines of the
century and found Britain's top-selling daily, The Sun, captured four of
the top 15.
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- ``Gotcha,'' the tabloid screamed from
its front page when a British submarine sank the Argentine warship the
Belgrano during the 1982 Falklands War. It also claimed that ``It's the
Sun Wot Won It'' after John Major's Conservatives sprang a surprise election
win in 1992. More poetically, William-Rees Mogg quoted Alexander Pope when
asking in the Times newspaper nearly 30 years ago: ``Who breaks a butterfly
on a wheel?'' after Britain threw the full weight of the law at Rolling
Stones singer Mick Jagger over drugs possession. The dictionary also aims
to explode a few myths. Many people know that Humphrey Bogart never actually
said ``Play it again Sam'' in the film Casablanca but it is less well known
that Captain Kirk never said ``Beam me up, Scotty'' in the 1960s cult science
fiction television series Star Trek.
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- And 19th century fictional supersleuth
Sherlock Holmes never said ``Elementary, my dear Watson'' to his sidekick
in Arthur Conan Doyle's books, although he did in many Hollywood films.
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