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Re: Mark Twain Quotation?



I have heard that phrase or something very similar attributed to the Missouri
River, also.

Janet Wendt
Janet M. Wendt, C.A.
Technical Services Archivist
University Archives
Oregon State University
94 Kerr Administration Building
Corvallis, OR 97331-2103
Janet.Wendt@orst.edu
541-737-2165
541-737-0541 Fax



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin Enns-Rempel [SMTP:kennsrem@FRESNO.EDU]
> Sent: Friday, April 07, 2000 10:09 AM
> To:   ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
> Subject:      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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A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

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Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>