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During a scene in the Apple TV show Ted Lasso, the title character, played by Jason Sudeikis, reflects on a quote supposedly written by 19th century American poet Walt Whitman that he once saw painted on a wall. Be curious, not judgmental. While that simple statement provided some guidance to the character, it also left him a little misinformed, as Whitman never wrote these words. Here's the scene from Ted Lasso: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x0PzUoJS-ULasso says in this scene: Lasso was not the first to misattribute these words to the iconic poet. If you search for Be Curious, Not Judgmental on the internet, you'll find memes, pins, T-shirts, artwork, and articles attributing these words to Whitman. But Whitman did not write this line. While some claim that this line can be found in Whitman's Leaves of Grass anthology, we searched digital copies of this work and found no trace of it. We also could not find this line in the Walt Whitman Archives. Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and the co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, told us that Whitman never said or wrote Be curious, not judgmental. Folsom told us: While Whitman certainly did not write Be curious, not judgmental, we're not exactly sure who did. We've found expressions of this general sentiment dating back to at least the 1970s. The earliest example we could find of this exact phrasing came came from an advice column by Marguerite and Marshall Shearer in response to a question from a parent who found oral contraceptives in their 17-year-old daughter's bedroom. The advice columnists wrote in a January 1986 edition of The Charlotte Observer:
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