Adam McKay's Oscar-winning filmThe Big Short opens with the to a higher place epigraph.

Seems appropriate plenty, for a cautionary tale near financial bubbles inflated past mass delusion. The motion-picture show, like the Michael Lewis book upon which it is based, focuses with sometimes queasy admiration on the handful of financiers who bet against the conventional wisdom of the Greenspan era: that U.S. housing prices would rising in perpetuity. The epigraph describes what, in The Alchemy of Finance, George Soros calls a "fertile fallacy," a principle of investment regarded as scientifically irrefutable considering over a short term information technology has proven conveniently enriching.

Twain is a natural mouthpiece for such a sentiment, considering his deep familiarity with financial crises, his own capacity for what John Kenneth Galbraith calls "speculative euphoria," and his tendency to admire, and aspire to, contrarian truth. McKay, who has evolved from workmanlike director of Will Ferrell's slapstick bromances into incisive satirist of the 2008 subprime crisis, no doubt feels a certain kinship with the penny newspaper fabulist who became America'south Shakespeare. The meaning pause earlier Twain's proper noun appears beneath the quotation suggests a director who fully appreciates the gravitas the writer brings to the proceedings.

There's only i problem with the epigraph. Twain never said it.

In that location is perchance no greater testament to Twain'south lasting reputation than the habitual misattribution of miscellaneous wit and wisdom to his name. The circulation of such apocryphal aphorisms was common enough in the 20th century. It has merely increased with the popularization of digital media. The virtually common question addressed to the Eye for Marker Twain Studies is some variety of "Did he actually say that?" Cataloguing our attempts to dutifully answer,The Apocryphal Twainwill be a regular feature on MarkTwainStudies.org. In this space, I volition, whenever possible, track down the original source, likewise as attempt to trace how their words came to be imagined in Twain'due south rima oris.

In hisQuote Verifier,Ralph Keynes notes that some variation of the "just ain't so" quip has been attributed non only to Twain, but besides Yogi Berra, Eubie Blake, Frank "Kin" Hubbard, Charles Kettering, Will Rogers, and Artemus Ward. Keynes speculates that several of them may accept borrowed the punchline from another 19th-century American humorist, Josh Billings. Amidst the "affurisms" listed in the 1886 edition of Billings's complete piece of work is the one-liner, "I honestly beleave information technology iz improve tew know zero than two know what ain't and then."

Keynes also notes that Vice President Al Gore frequently attributed the quote to Twain, about famously in the Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore started using the line in public appearances at least as early as 1994. Information technology seems likely he is disproportionately responsible for perpetuating the myth of Twain's authorship. My search yielded only one occasion prior to 1994 when the line was attributed to Twain, in an obscure regime study on medical liability. It is non inconceivable that the legendarily wonkish Gore, who was a senator when the study was commissioned, actually read information technology and extracted this little tidbit he could stump on.

Gore was not the first politician to recognize the aphorism'due south sloganeering potential. Erstwhile Vice President Walter Mondale used it repeatedly during his 1984 presidential entrada. One of the highlights of the commencement debate was when Mondale responded to President Ronald Reagan's denial that his administration was dismantling welfare by proverb, "Well, I guess I'm reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers one time said nearly Herbert Hoover. He said, 'Information technology's not what he doesn't know that bothers me, it'due south what he knows for sure that just ain't so."

New York Times fact-checkers could not confirm the Rogers/Hoover anecdote. They speculated the quote actually came from Billings, Hubbard, or Ward. Information technology seems likely that variations on this punchline were passed around the American humor circuit during the late 19th and early 20th century. Twain plain belonged to this community, but at that place is no substantive prove he created this wisecrack, or stole it.

The spike in attributions to Twain in the late 1990s was also aided by Joe Schwarcz, the Canadian public intellectual who frequently used the quote in his efforts to debunk medical myths and promote science pedagogy.

From 1994 to 2006, it was increasingly common for Twain, never associated with the quip prior to 1991, to be cited as its source, but Rogers and Yogi Berra were nonetheless mentioned with some regularity. After AnInconvenient Truthbecame one of the most successful documentaries in cinema history, grossing $50 Meg worldwide and enflaming the climate alter contend, Gore's promotion of Twain'southward illegitimate claim became widely accepted. In the terminal decade more than fifty newspapers, including several outside the U.S., take attributed the quote to Twain without qualification, as take a dozen law reviews, a handful of academic journals, and, of class, hundreds of websites.

This apocryphal adage has proven itself a convenient untruth.