Ascription is critical: New Swansea stadium sponsors wrongly attribute quote to Dylan Thomas
The new sponsors of Swansea City Stadium have become the latest to incorrectly attribute a famous quote attached to the city to Dylan Thomas.
The website changed the attribution of the quote ‘Ambition is critical’ on its front page from one of its most famous residents, Dylan Thomas, to the rather less-known social worker David Hughes after the blunder was pointed out.
The quote, which is frequently accidentally attributed to the Welsh poet, was embedded in paving slabs outside Swansea train station.
It was made famous by the 1997 film Twin Town in which it is discussed by characters Terry and Greyo.
When Terry asks whether “ambition is f*****g critical”, Greyo responds: “It says ambition is critical. There’s no f*****g in it.”
Someone tell the people at Swansea dot com that Dylan Thomas didn’t write ‘ambition is critical’🤦🏽♀️ pic.twitter.com/3Dkc8gyFxH
— Catrin Newman (@catrinnewman) August 9, 2021
It was announced yesterday that the Liberty Stadium has been renamed the Swansea.com Stadium under a 10 year agreement.
The company aren’t the latest to wrongly attribute the quote to Dylan Thomas. In 2011 Plaid Cymru launched a manifesto titled Ambition is Critical, and made a direct reference to the quote being written by Dylan Thomas.
“As Wales prepares in 2014 to mark a centenary since the birth of Dylan Thomas, his words have been adopted by Plaid as their guiding principle for both the manifesto and the next Welsh government,” it said.
The manifesto was later changed online when the mistake was pointed out.
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I’d say ‘Unnbelieevable’ but it clearly isn’t. Learn from mistakes? No chance. A hundred years from now it will still be quoted as Dylan Thomas’s work. Eventually historians will decide it really was by Dylan Thomas!
A pretty ridiculous and embarrassing mistake for a Swansea company to make. The man who penned those words, David Hughes, is an acclaimed poet in his own right. Admittedly, he is not as famous as Dylan, but he is a mighty fine wordsmith and contemporary observer of our nation’s many follies and foibles.
While perhaps not as well known as Dylan Thomas, David Hughes is still a local published Swansea poet, he has a new collection recently released with Parthian Books. https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/new-releases/products/working-out
Rage, rage against the dying of the proofreading
Complete and utter zomies attributing this to DYLAN, obviously not Welsh and completely ignorant.
I’m Welsh and I didn’t know the quote either. It’s not much of a quote at that. “Ambition is critical”. Is it? Just vague meaningless memery