That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born | Hacker News Reader

That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born

nytimes.com

68 pointstysone17 comments

Quote Investigator has basically trained me to reflexively assume that if a quote is pithy and timeless, then it probably didn't originate from someone famous.

One of my favorite quote investigations: whether Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

My metric is—if that quote sounds fancy or profound only because a famous name is tagged to it, it probably did originate from that name.

Quotes that sound nice irrespective of the origina are probably apocryphal.

Same thing with etymologies: if it has a funny story and not "from the PIE kwa* or possible borrowed during the late 5th century meaning basically the same thing" then it's probably false.

My reflex is to go the Quote Investigator first whenever I see a quote I would like to share. If I don't find it there, then I rather not reshare it.

Yes, the site doesn't cover all quotes. But the large number of mis-attributed quotes I've seen shared has made me conservative in what quotes I reshare.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

This is my favorite Mark Twain misquote because it's self-referential.

Some background about the mis-quote parent is talking about: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/126677/it-aint-dont-know-get...

As someone who has quoted it on HN recently, I don't think that misattributing it is going to get anyone into trouble. What's going to get them into trouble is not having any life experience that validates the sentiment.

A previous analysis in Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/quote_...

One of the most famous fake Twain quotes is: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

Or in other words: "The most famous sentence Mark Twain ever put to paper was written by anonymous."

People attribute quotes to famous people because that gives the quote more weight.

Yes, and people want to be listened to and attributing what you are saying to someone with better credentials is essentially a way of increasing the power of what you are saying.

This is a great book on such quotes: https://www.amazon.com/They-Never-Said-Misleading-Attributio...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com