All generalizations are false

A question on Yahoo! Answers drew my attention to yet another example of Mark Twain as a 'quote magnet' - an iconic author who attracts misattributions.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

This is widely attributed to Twain online, but it undoubtedly isn't by him: the first print attribution to Twain I can find dates to 1973. So who did coin it? Google Books finds the first appearances are in the second decade of the 20th century, with the usual vague attributions, including:

"some one, a Frenchman perhaps" (1911); "the man" (1917); "an old Chinese proverb" (1919); "Dumas" (1920);  "a French professor" (1920); "one of my history professors at college" (1921); "the Frenchman" (1922; "the witty epigrammatist" (1923); "the Gallic epigrammatist" (1926); "a witty philosopher" (1927); "the witty writer" (1928).

All that can really be said is that the earliest examples are all in US publications. The repeated attribution to a French origin did look hopeful (see previously, Batrachian breakfasts), but the French form - "Toutes les généralisations sont fausses, y compris celle-ci" - appears no older, nor any better attributed, than the English version.

I have, however, found a more detailed scenario for a different wording:

I would recall what happened in a debate of the French Chamber of Deputies. A deputy, criticising the previous speaker, said: "Monsieur X has generalized too freely. I contend that all generalizations are wrong" — and here he paused, and his Gallic wit saved him, when he added — "Yes, all generalizations are wrong, even this one."
- The Asiatic Review, Volume 24, The East India Association, 1928.

Currently, the trail ends there.

Addendum: 10 April 2014. I just pushed back the date a little, though with attributions no more likely to be true:

Voltaire has said, "All generalizations are false, and this is no exception."
- Engineering News, Vol 1, No. 26, page 366, 1903

.... as a Frenchman brilliantly said, “All generalities are false, this one included"
- The Blue and Gold, Volume 20, page 179, 1893

 The bulk of attributions, nevertheless, claim a French origin.

- Ray

Batrachian breakfasts

A recent post at Fencing Bear at Prayer - Bear's Frogs - reminded me of an aphorism that has had my attribution-sense tingling for some time. A fairly typical statement of it is this:

Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.
- -Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time (2007)

It's a very good metaphor for workflow - a reminder of the necessity to tackle the unpleasant/dull tasks rather than procrastinate - but if it's by Twain I'll (metaphorically) eat a batrachian for breakfast. Twain and frogs are linked thematically via his rather unpleasant 1867 story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, but no such aphorism appears there; furthermore, a quick search of Google Books for "eat * frog" Twain finds no attributions to Mark Twain prior to Brian Tracy's self-help book, so I think it's likely the Twain part started there.

The aphorism comes in variants of what you have to eat - the first version I heard concerned a live toad, and rarely it's a bullfrog - but none of them at first glance seemed very old. For instance:

Above the cash register was a small sign which read, "Eat a live frog for breakfast and nothing worse can happen to you all day."
- Foreign Service Journal, Volumes 56-57, American Foreign Service Association, 1979

Eat a Bullfrog First Thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
- advertisement in Hobbies, Volume 82, Issues 1-6, Lightner Pub. Co., 1977

Upon rising each morning a man should eat a live toad, to be sure that for the rest of the day he will have to swallow nothing more disgusting.
- The thirty-eighth floor: a novel, Clifford Irving, McGraw-Hill, 1965

However, one major lead takes the trail right out of the English language, two centuries back, and to a firm attribution: Cyril Connolly's 1945 The Unquiet Grave ("a collection of aphorisms, quotes, nostalgic musings and mental explorations") contains a discussion of the French writer Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794) and the following footnote:

"All literature might be ransacked in vain for a more repulsive saying than this (of Chamfort): 'A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.'" — Morley: Studies of Literature, p. 95

Googling "Nicolas Chamfort" crapaud rapidly found the source of this quotation. Although Chamfort specialised in acerbic aphorisms, in this case he's citing an earlier author, who is commenting on high society:

M. de Lassay, homme très-doux, mais qui avait une grande connaissance delà société, disait qu'il faudrait avaler un crapaud tous les matins, pour ne trouver plus rien de dégoûtant le reste de la journée, quand on devait la passer dans le monde.

M. de Lassay, a very indulgent man, but with a great knowledge of society, said that we should swallow a toad every morning, in order to fortify ourselves against the disgust of the rest of the day, when we have to spend it in society.

- pp. 35-336, Oeuvres, Volume 4, Sébastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, 1795.
- translation from page 192, Causeries du Lundi, Volume 7, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Routledge, 1851

The M. de Lassay cited by Chamfort is Armand de Madaillan, Marquis de Lassay (1652-1738), a flamboyant character nicknamed "the Don Juan of the Grand Siècle" ("The Great Century" = the 1700s in France) and who was a well-known aphorist.  Obviously Chamfort didn't get the toad aphorism first-hand - he was born three years after M. de Lassay's death - and I haven't been able to find an earlier citation.  Still, tracking it to 1795 is a good result, and it well disposes of the Mark Twain theory.

- Ray

Mark Twain: good blogging advice

This is completely lifted from Mark Liberman's post at Language Log - From Mark Twain's autobiography - but it's such good advice that I can't resist quoting it:

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; talk only about the thing which intrests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.

And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless. It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.

- page 220, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, Mark Twain, ed. Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick, University of California Press, 2010 - originally "Author's Note" in Mark Twain's autobiography, Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine, 1924

Mark Liberman comments, "This is also the right plan for successful blogging, in my experience".

I couldn't agree more, particularly if you extend the concept to the balance between "personal" (day-to-day authorial experience) and "external" (topic material encountered or uncovered). It's an approach that has kept me interested in JSBlog for four years - despite an initial dread of running out of ideas -  and it's the one used by the weblogs that I read most regularly, as well as pre-weblog diary accounts such as Cecil Torr's Small Talk at Wreyland (a diary of an antiquarian landowner).  A similar format can be very successful in fiction, as with WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn (which combines the narrator's walking tour of East Anglia with meditations on the history of places visited).

- Ray