"Guild the lily" is fight'n words in some English departments.
They feel if you're going to quote Shakespeare, he should be quoted properly and the abundance of textual evidence allow his troop of implacable guardians to protect his literary legacy and keep his quotables intact. But Shakespeare himself lifted, condensed, distilled, and compressed. He most likely wouldn't bat an eye at his own sayings being altered, modernized into pithy aphorisms. For centuries, "paint the lily" gave good competition in popular usage, either one is equally appropriate, the actual quote, from King John, is "guild refined gold, to paint the lily is wasteful and ridiculous excess." Said by a peer referring to the new king's idea to have a second coronation. Now I suppose you can improve on Shakespeare, or not actually quote him per se, truncate phrases or transpose their elements for the modern zeitgeist, but you must admit, the man had a way with words. Extra stuff in liquid gold chicken broth is like that, exactly.
I don't even know any English majors personally, all my friends tend to be practical people.
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