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

Mark Twain is one of many who gets credit for famous quotations he never wrote or said.
JEFF CHIU / ASSOCIATED PRESS
By NIRAJ CHOKSHI
APRIL 26, 2017
How fitting that the man often credited with saying “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” most likely did not invent the phrase.

Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, that quotation instead appears to be a descendant of a line published centuries ago by the satirist Jonathan Swift. Variants emerged and mutated over time until a modern version of the saying was popularized by a Victorian-era preacher, according to Garson O’Toole, a researcher who, like Twain, prefers a pseudonym.

Seven years ago, Mr. O’Toole started Quote Investigator, a popular website where he traces the origins of well-known sayings. This month, he published “Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations,” a book in which he collected and updated many of the posts from his site and offers new theories on how misquotations form.

“When I started off, it was mysterious exactly where these misquotations were coming from, and it was interesting that sometimes you could find these clues that pointed to how they may have originated,” said Mr. O’Toole, an alias for Gregory F. Sullivan, a former teacher and researcher in the Johns Hopkins computer science department who now spends his time writing.


In the book, Mr. Sullivan offers 10 common “mechanisms” that he says lead to misquotation and incorrect attribution.

Through one such process, which he labels “textual proximity,” a famous person mistakenly gets credit for a quotation merely by having their name or likeness published close to the words. In another, “ventriloquy,” a statement about an individual’s work is perceived to be so apt that it is eventually confused for their own words.

Both may explain how Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer, became associated with the saying: “Any idiot can face a crisis, it’s the day-to-day living that wears you out,” as outlined on Mr. Sullivan’s website and, now, in his book.

In May 2013, Mr. Sullivan heard from a reader who, after a fruitless attempt to prove Chekhov’s authorship of those words, wanted help uncovering the true history of the quotation.


Mr. Sullivan accepted the challenge.

Google Books led him to “The Tradition of the Theatre,” a textbook published in 1971 and edited by Peter Bauland and William Ingram. Only snippets were available online, so he visited a university library to review the book in full. In it, he found the following, written by Mr. Bauland and Mr. Ingram:

A character in a Hollywood film of the 1950s casually drops this line: “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” The screenplay was by Clifford Odets, America’s chief inheritor of the dramatic tradition of Anton Chekhov, and in that one line, he epitomized the lesson of his master.

Though Mr. Sullivan was unable to confirm Mr. Odets’s authorship of the sentence, he theorized that Mr. Odets wrote something similar, which was then misquoted in the 1971 textbook. The earliest citation Mr. Sullivan could find crediting the saying to Chekhov was from 1981.

That final attribution could have been the result of: textual proximity, in which an oblivious reader saw Chekhov’s name and blindly attributed the quotation to him; ventriloquy, in which a reader found the line so resonated with Chekhov’s style that these words were mistaken for his; or some combination.

Mr. Sullivan published his analysis in June 2013, but more than two years later, a reader came forward with a new lead, referring him to the 1954 movie “The Country Girl,” based on a play by Mr. Odets.


Mr. Sullivan watched the movie and discovered these words uttered by Bing Crosby:

I faced a crisis up there in Boston, and I got away with it. Just about anybody can face a crisis. It’s that everyday living that’s rough.

The movie was based on a play by Mr. Odets, but, after failing to find the line in a 1951 edition of the script, Mr. Sullivan believes that yet another man most likely coined the phrase. Ultimately, he would credit the “any idiot” line to George Seaton, who wrote the screenplay.

The other mechanisms Mr. Sullivan identified include:

• Synthesis and streamlining, a process in which a quotation is simplified over time;

• Proverbial wisdom, in which a quotation is elevated to the status of a proverb because its source is unknown;

• Real-world proximity, when an individual wrongly gets credit for a quotation because they share a real-world connection to the true author;

• Similar names, the mistaken attribution of a quotation to someone whose name resembles that of the true author;

• Concoctions, which are pure fabrications, intentional or otherwise;

• Historical fiction, when an individual gets credit for words uttered by a character portraying them in a movie, novel or other work of fiction;

• Capture, when a famous person gets credit for echoing the words of someone less well-known;

• Host, in which an individual, simply by being famous, attracts credit for quotations they never delivered, with Mr. Twain and Albert Einstein being popular examples.