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Re: Mark Twain Quotation?



harperc@SLU.EDU wrote:

> Many people I've spoken to here in St. Louis have heard the phrase "too
> thick to drink and too thin to plow," ascribed to Mark Twain and
> supposedly his comment on St. Louis drinking water taken from the
> Mississippi River at the turn of the twentieth century.  But I don't find
> this quotation listed in any of the dictionaries, either general or of
> Twain's words alone.

I ran the words "thick drink thin plow" through http://www.google.com, which
found 902 instances of this phrase on the Internet. Needless to say, I didn't
look at them all (even if it is Friday). If you add the words "Mark Twain" to
that list of words, the hits drop to about 40. The ones I looked at seem to
be the same kind of vague attribution you're already aware of, but maybe
something more reliable will turn up if you search farther down the list than
I did.

I did get the impression that this phrase was a common one, used not only
about the Mississippi, but also the Platte and Colorado Rivers. If Twain did
say it, he probably lifted it from the general parlance of the time.

--
Kevin Enns-Rempel, Archivist
Fresno Pacific University
kennsrem@fresno.edu

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