Well now it's curious so many folks have come to this humble blog in search of information about the saying, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble..."
The website statistics tell me that just yesterday Google sent ten people here (darned near a single-day record), who had typed one variation of that saying or another into the search field. (Yahoo sent a total of none, which may indicate why that company is on the skids.)
I typed the first part of the phrase into Google myself, just now, and this blog came up third on the results page. Kind of gratifying, I guess. Another blogger over at the Humanities Division at Northwest College has put a link to my "It ain't..." post on their website, and that seems to have brought some folks here, too. (To return the favor: it's here.)
I don't know what it is that fascinates so many people about a thing that Mark Twain may have -- or may not have -- said. But people in California, Illinois, British Columbia, our Nation's Capitol, England, Texas and even Vietnam demonstrated on the same day this week some curiosity about my favorite aphorism.
I've written in this space about John McCain and why the McCainines lost the election. Real important and insightful stuff, I thought. But nobody seems curious about that.
I've posted some stories that I've passed off as humor, and few people seem to give a hoot.
Somebody checked in from Durham, North Carolina, didn't see what they were looking for, and bounced away in under a second, while a devoted fan in San Francisco visited three times yesterday, looked at three pages each time, and spent all of eight minutes here -- probably looking for the exit.
One individual dropped by to find out something about Arthur C. Clarke, who I happened to mention in one post, and stuck around for 17 minutes to peruse 6 pages. This is an example of how the Internet can get you off track. Whoever that was got distracted by other things and totally forgot why he or she came into the room. I sometimes do that myself, so I understand the feeling.
If there were some way to make a buck off people's curiosity about "It ain't what you know..." I would sure like to know what it is. More than that, though, I'd like to find out why people in so many places in the world are so darned interested in it. Must be important enough to them that they spend their valuable time on Google tracking down the phrase.
Google Analytics doesn't let me know who you are, but it shows me a little bit about how visitors got here and where they hail from and even what browser they use. I wish it would give me some insight into what the heck they're doing here, what they were thinking.
So, do this for me if you'd be so kind: Leave a comment and let me know why you dropped by. What were you looking for that you did or didn't find? I won't be offended if you got here by mistake; most of my visitors probably did.
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Unsurprisingly, I stopped by after a good search, looking for the source of the quote.
ReplyDeleteI learned the quote as "It ain't what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that ain't so". And I recall it as being attributed to Will Rodgers.
And, like some of your other visitors, having arrived here, I shall now poke around your blog for a while :-)
i had vaguely heard that there was a Billings version in addition to the pithiest (Twain/Rogers) version, and your site was the second that came up in my Metacrawler search. (the first site attributed the T/R version to Billings, thereby astonishing me.) Thanks for providing the info, and in such a genial format. Have you ever seen an attribution earlier than the Twain / Billings era?
ReplyDeleteThe "just ain't so quote" is also attributed to Charles Farrar Browne, aka Artemus Ward, who was an influence of Clemens, and said to be Lincoln's favorite author.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Farrar_Browne
Same here... I wanted to give a proper attribution, and discovered pretty quickly that the actual author has unfortunately gone to his grave without getting this little taste of immortality. Or perhaps he was witty enough to have some other aphorism to his credit, if not a novel or two.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, thank Google for sending me here. Now I'm off to learn a bit about Josh Billings... having run in the annual "Josh" up in the Berkshires, I feel I should know a bit more about the fellow.
I read a collection of Josh Billings' sayings in the Lockwood Library at SUNY Buffalo once, and think it too bad that his fame has disappeared.
ReplyDeleteCame by way of Yahoo, although Bling tried to cut in.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of the source this is still one of my favorite quotes. Surely it is ironic that people are sure of who said it!
I came via Google -> answerblog. I wanted to use the quote in a talk about uncertainty analysis (as the practice of not claiming to know what just ain't so),and attribute the quote properly.
ReplyDeleteI came via the same route as Woody. I'm about to tweet the quote at the Repubs and wanted to fair with my atribution.
ReplyDeleteWikiquote, Mark Twain. I have seen this line attributed, I seem to remember, to four different 19th century humorists, but can't find the page that brought Twain, Billings, Ward, and whoever else together. There is a ridiculous number of 20th-century attributions, many of them to my eye entirely ludicrous.
ReplyDeleteAmbrose Bierce?
ReplyDeleteWell, now, Wheels of Justice, I have never seen Ambrose Bierce credited with this remark, but that doesn't mean he never said it. He probably also said "Please pass the gravy," and is as deserving of credit for verbalizing that request as Mark Twain.
ReplyDeleteBierce is most famous for his "Devil's Dictionary," originally published in 1906 with the title "The Cynic's Word Book." It was an outgrowth of some of his earlier newspaper columns. Bierce defined "dictionary," by the way, as "A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic." He went on to say that his own compilation was, however, "a most useful work."
One thing he wrote about knowledge was this: "The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge." And that's not far from the same thing.
I found your post indirectly after searching for "It's not what they don't know; it's what they do know that ain't so." Christopher Hitchens said it about Rick Perry in an impromptu interview and I had a suspicion it wasn't "his". (Not that that matters much, as you pointed out previously).
ReplyDeleteOh, and sorry for the double comment.
Because I had a choice between ignorance, apathy, or learning something before I used the quote. Will keep looking.
ReplyDeleteHappy hunting, Pax.
ReplyDeleteI also came here via the footnote on the Mark Twain Wikiquote page. I stumbled onto the quote somewhere and was considering repeating it, but was dubious about the attribution and went to Google for more information.
ReplyDeleteLooking for source of the quote on Google. Your site was #1! I guess I'll leave it unattributed.
ReplyDeleteAnd do you really need to have BOTH CAPTCHA and authorial approval for comments?
ReplyDeleteWell, you raise a good point, Chip. I've got both turned on, each for a different reason. Captcha (Blogger calls it "Word Verification") keeps the spam down. I like to have real comments sent to me for approval, though, so that I am notified that a comment has been made. There's no other way to get an email sent to me when somebody posts. I reject very few comments - only obvious spam, not those calling me an idiot or worse. I suppose I could just let anybody post anything without moderation, but how would I know they'd done so? If they asked a question, I wouldn't know to answer. And that would make me appear rude, no?
ReplyDeleteI got here by way of a reference link on the Mark Twain Wikiquotes page. I was thinking of having the quote printed on a t-shirt, so I figured I had better research the attribution first.
ReplyDeleteSome ideas have an almost tangible, external existence in the sense that thinkers of a given persuasion will eventually perceive them. Other ideas are made obvious by a developing social context; this source is given recognition in the expression, "an idea whose time has come." Like many of our primate relatives, we humans get plenty of mileage out of copying successful behaviour—so much so, that we tend to automatically assume a "new" idea that is found to already exist must have been "borrowed" (especially in matters involving intellectual property rights). I suspect independent discovery (aka "reinventing the wheel") accounts for more confusion concerning the origins of things than most people imagine. It seems that some ideas are just so self-evident that thoughtful people cannot fail to notice them.
The problem is so many people seem to know for sure why they are here. I simply don't know and I think I am better off for it. But don't quote me.
ReplyDeleteHAH! Thank you for that, Anonymous. I will not quote you; you must get tired of being quoted as often as you are. Why, I see your name all over Bartlett's, and it's hard to believe one person could say so many clever things.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to post the quote on Facebook and wanted to get it right, sorry to find it to be so self-fulfilling, I mean I knew it was by Twain and it turns out likely not to be so!?!?!?
ReplyDeleteI, too, arrived from Wikiquote looking for a good citation. Guess I'll stick with "unknown".
ReplyDeleteI too came in the (fruitless?) search for knowledge. Thanks for your blogging to set the record straight... or muddy the waters further :-)
ReplyDeleteThey show the quote and attribute it to Twain in "The Big Short" movie. Michael Lewis actually used a Tolstoy quote, "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." Lewis dated the quote 1897 which gives me some confidence that it is a real Tolstoy quote, unlike the Twain "quote".
ReplyDeleteFinding it a fun ramble to bounce around this quotation (not quote) and see what all the fuss is about. Previous poster Josh B does well to cite the Tolstoy with which Michael Lewis introduces his book, and I trace that quotation to The Kingdom of God is Within You, (Lincoln. Bison/U. Nebraska, 1984 Chapter III, p.49) That work dates to 1894 and was first published in Germany, according to Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteAs for Twain, he'd likely be thrilled with the attribution, and as I suppose someone must receive the credit...