Is this a real quote?

Question

One of my cheekier students recently put this quote in an essay they wrote:

"Art is the... bow* I aim, a UK air-bus I fly. Art was oui, no?" - Samuel Endeavour

I can't find any online presence for the quote anywhere and I suspect there's something fishy about it...

Can anybody help me figure out what it means?

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(Note: All events described in this story are fictional.)

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Hint:

I don't know why I didn't check his footnotes earlier - the one attached to the asterisk in the quote reads "The name is a hint to the solve." - I can't find any attributions to a "Samuel Endeavour" so maybe this has some truth to it...

Hint II:

After some scrupulous studying, I'm pretty sure you need to associate some symbols with some subsets of letters...

Answer 1

Jafe and M Oehm have gotten pretty much all the way there so please give them your upvotes.

This answer just combines their deductions to finish it off.

Firstly, a key observation from Jafe

Replace vowels with dots and consonants with dashes to get the following (I have made a slight change here by interpreting Y as a vowel).

 Art is the bow I aim a UK air bus I fly Art was oui no

 .-- .- --. -.- . ..- . .- ..- -.- . --. .-- -.- ... -.

 W   A  G   K   E U   E A  U   K   E G   W   K   S   N

 

Now use the key observation from M Oehm

Break the sentence into segments using the punctuation in the sentence as separators.
WAG/K/EU/EAU/KEG/WKS/N

Finally, using Jafe's observation once more, but in reverse

Replace vowels with dashes and consonants with dots to get the following.

 WAG K EU EAU KEG WKS N

 .-. . -- --- .-. ... .

 R E M O R S E
 

This gives the final answer, as predicted by M Oehm

REMORSE

Parroting M Oehm, this is indeed

A very satisfying answer as we must translate letters to morse code to letters to morse code to letters again using two opposite techniques.

Answer 2

Looks like this has gone over a year without any progress, so I hope it's okay to post a partial answer. This is annoyingly incomplete, especially since I'm entirely drawing a blank on the main mechanism. Anyway, I'm pretty much stuck and just want to record my progress so maybe someone can finish it.

To start with, "Endeavour" is

the first name of TV's Inspector Morse.

So in actuality we're probably looking for a quote by

Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and Morse code.

Taking hint 2 into account, we likely need to

replace each leatter in the quote with either a dot or a dash, to spell out a message when read out in Morse code. This is supported by the fact that, ignoring punctuation, all words in the quote are 1-3 letters long and therefore the right length for Morse code characters.

One seemingly promising way to do the replacement (that doesn't seem to work) would be

to replace vowels with dots and consonants with dashes (or vice versa). This would explain the presence of a word like "oui" in the quote, since there are no common English words made up of just three vowels.

However, this doesn't work and I can't come up with another system that would produce an intelligible result. Augh!

 Art is the bow I aim a UK air bus I fly Art was oui no

 .-- .- --. -.- . ..- . .- ..- -.- . --- .-- -.- ... -.

 W   A  G   K   E U   E A  U   K   E O   W   K   S   N



 Art is the bow I aim a UK air bus I fly Art was oui no

 -.. -. ..- .-. - --. - -. --. .-. - ... -.. .-. --- .-

 D   N  U   R   T G   T N  G   R   T S   D   R   O   A

One thing that I don't understand at all that probably plays some kind of role is

the punctuation. Commas and hyphens could just be there to make the quote read as normal text, but surely there's a good reason to put an asterisk at the end of "bow" there.

I suspect the final answer we're looking for is somehow

"What hath God wrought?", the first message ever transmitted by telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1844. The lengths almost match (16 words in the quote, 18 letters in the result) and it would be nicely thematic. However, as much as I want the answer to be this, there would need to be some kind of modification to the message that I don't understand. In particular, the letter H is four symbols in Morse code and there are no four-letter words in the given quote.

Answer 3

Jafe has described a possible way to solve this, which unfortunately doesn't lead to an answer. One of the remaining mysteries is what the punctuation means.

I have another idea. The punctuation ...

... separates letters in the answer. This yields chunks of one to three words:

Art is the / bow / I aim / a UK air / bus I fly / Art was oui / no?

Each word represents either a dot or a dash to yield a seven-letter word. (There's a word tag, after all. But like in Jafe's interpretation, what about four-symbol Morse signs?)

The words ...

... must be rendered as Morse code. If the first sign of the word is a dot, the word is a dash and vice versa. (What? Well, the code for dash (-.. .- ... ....) has more dots than dashes and the code for dot (-.. --- -) has more dashes than dots. This line of reasoning falls a bit flat for dit and dah, though.)

Anyway, if we do that, we get the (non-)word GEMOWGE:

 Art is the      .- .-. - / .. ... / - .... .            G --.
 bow             -... --- .--                            E .
 I aim           .. / .- .. --                           M --
 a UK air        .- / ..- -.- / .- .. .-.                O ---
 bus I fly       -... ..- ... / .. / ..-. .-.. -.--      W .--
 Art was oui     .- .-. - / .-- .- .. / --- ..- ..       G --.
 no              -. ---                                  E .

But ...

... if we can somehow make "Art", "was" and "fly" be dots, the answer were REMORSE, and that would be a very satisfying answer for a puzzle involving Morse code and where the first step is not to decode disguised Morse signs, but to encode them again – to re-morse, so to speak.

 Art is the      R .-.
 bow             E .
 I aim           M --
 a UK air        O ---
 bus I fly       R .-.
 Art was oui     S ...
 no              E .

Well, ...

... that's all a bit sketchy. I admit that I have tried to shoehorn in an interpretation of how to turn words into Morse signs once I had seen that the pattern of (3, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 1) signs can make "remorse", which I thought promising.

Perhaps there is another way to make (I, UK, a, aim, air, is) mean dash and (Art, bow, bus, fly, no, oui, the, was) mean dot. That still wouldn't explain the odd choice of words and why Jafe's interpretation didn't at least yield a "red fish" or some such.

Anyway, that's that off my chest. I feel no remorse ... (ho, ho!)