Bastard Wit

The angry man at the town-council meeting snarled, “As Harry Truman put it, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ ” “No,” answered his tension-easing neighbor, “that was Mark Twain. You remember, the guy who also said, ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco’—and he should have been talking about the weather we get around here.” Everybody laughed, and the council moved on to water rates.

Painting of Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman sitting together

Except, of course, that Harry Truman didn’t coin that phrase about lying statistics, and Mark Twain only quoted it, attributing the line in 1906 to Benjamin Disraeli because he thought Leonard Courtney had said in 1895 that Disraeli had come up with it before he died in 1881, although, in truth, Disraeli didn’t say it, and Courtney never said he did. At that point, the trail runs cold, and the origin of the phrase fades into the mists of anonymity.

At a guess, someone in London around 1875 made a joke about escalating falsehoods. I picture him as a lawyer, for some reason—a punster, probably, with a shyly sly sense of humor. Certainly, by 1885, Thomas Huxley was calling classes of legal witnesses “liars, d—d liars, and experts,” as though the phrase were well known. By the 1890s, ordinary people had picked it up, sanded it off a little, repurposed it, and left us with the completed phrase about statistics.

The only trouble was that it lacked ascription. It still needed the oomph, the weight, that comes with authority. And so Mark Twain gets the line because he did, in fact, quote it and because—well, because it’s funny and he’s Mark Twain, author of funny lines. Give a man a reputation for comedy (as John Randolph complained in the early 1800s, after hearing jokes he never told repeated and ascribed to him) and half the bastard wit of the nation gets fathered upon him.