Sometimes a column will simply hijack itself.
For instance, this week I sat down to write about one of my pet peeves: overconfidence.
Overconfidence, whether it’s issuing from the mouth of a salesman (“‘Toyota’ means ‘reliability’ in Japanese!”), a dentist (“Worst case, you’ll feel a pin-prick!”), or an oil executive (“Off-shore drilling couldn’t be safer!”) drives me nuts.
I even lined up one of my favorite quotations from Mark Twain to help make my case:
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”
I’ve always loved that quotation. Wrong-headedness, the stubborn attachment to a false idea or opinion, is at the root of so much human misery.
There’s only one problem. I seem to have been somewhat overconfident that Mark Twain actually said it.
I try to be careful about attributions. I mean, part of a writer’s job is to steal liberally from his predecessors. Literary larceny can be artful, crude, or even unconscious, but the least you can do for your victim is to try to give him proper credit.
But the deeper I looked into Twain’s famous quotation, the more suspicious I became. “The things we know that just ain’t so” has been faithfully quoted by speakers and writers for decades, but I couldn’t find a single reliable reference to a speech or written work by Mark Twain.
At least one other writer — a much more thorough one, to boot — had gone sleuthing in this vein before me. Ralph Keyes, in his 2006 barn-burner, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When, tried to trace the famous aphorism back to Twain but ran into a dead end.
His conclusion? Twain didn’t say it at all, although he seems to have, uh, appropriated it and made it much more clunky: “It isn’t so astonishing the things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.”
The true originator was none other than Twain’s rival, the second most famous humorist and lecturer of the day, Josh Billings.
Josh who? If he was so famous, why hadn’t I ever heard of him?
Turns out that Josh Billings, the pen name of Henry Wheeler Shaw, was a huge hit in the mid-19th century, although history hasn’t been quite as kind to him as it has been to Twain. Perhaps his single greatest contribution to the American language was his popularization of the phrase, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” which Billings made into an official idiom with this bad little poem:
“I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking,
Is the one that gets the grease.”
A “kicker,” in the parlance of the time, was a complainer. I hate to be something of a kicker myself, but much of Billings’s work is forgettable, in the vein of this awkward witticism:
“It strains a man’s philosophy the worst kind to laugh when he gets beat.”
Or, perhaps, to laugh at a lousy aphorism.
But Billings did have his moments. For instance, this seeming oxymoron, shot through with truth:
“There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.”
I like that one very much.
Aside from penning some not-very-funny one-liners, Billings specialized in writing comedy in torturously misspelled backwoods dialect. Twain did this, too, most famously in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which shattered conventions of spelling and grammar in order to be true to the regional voices he’d heard as a boy.
Alas, Billings was no Mark Twain. Here’s a taste of some prime Billings:
“A man’s reputashun iz something like hiz coat, thare iz certain kemikals that will take the stains and grease spots out ov it, but it alwus haz a second-handed kind ov a look, and generally smells strong ov the kemikals.”
Perhaps you’re getting a sense of why Billings was something of a literary also-ran.
Mark Twain isn’t the only author incorrectly cited for “the things we know that just ain’t so.” Artemus Ward, the pen name of Charles Farrar Brown, is often credited with it, too.
I didn’t know much about Artemus Ward, but I was glad for the opportunity to read up on him. He was very funny man. Influential, too. He was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite writer. Apparently, Lincoln read his cabinet a snippet of Artemus Ward before presenting his own Emancipation Proclamation. Probably to break the ice.
Ward is responsible for beauties like this:
“I can’t sing. As a singist I am not a success. I am saddest when I sing. So are those who hear me. They are sadder even than I am.”
He wrote lines Groucho Marx would have been proud of, like this one:
“Did you ever have the measels, and if so, how many?”
And this one, which rings especially true today:
“Let us all be happy and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the money to do it with.”
Ward was an expert practitioner of backwoods dialect. His greatest fictional creation was a blowhard of an impressario who roamed the countryside with a flea-bitten exhibition of wax-works and “exotic” animals, an American original whose patter practically gives overconfidence a good name. I’ll close with my own snippet of Artemus Ward, with an apology for the theft, and also for letting this column get so completely out of hand:
“My show at present consists of three moral Bares, a Kangaroo (a amoozin little Raskal–t’would make you larf yerself to deth to see the little cuss jump up and squeal) wax figgers of G. Washington Gen. Tayler John Bunyan Capt Kidd and Dr. Webster in the act of killin Dr. Parkman, besides several miscellanyus moral wax statoots of celebrated piruts & murderers, &c., ekalled by few & exceld by none.”
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 20 May 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
