(Further) antedating quote about spelling

[Garson O'Toole]

Many thanks to Stephen Goranson, Joel  Berson, and Victor Steinbok for
your efforts and discoveries. Excellent!

While searching I was intrigued by the variety of attributions. Ralph
Keyes in the Quote Verifier comments about this and discusses why
Andrew Jackson was often mentioned:

Credit for different forms of the jocular old saw gets passed around,
to Thomas Jefferson, Oscar Wilde, and Kansas congressman Jerry
"Sockless" Simpson, among others. In his time Andrew Jackson was a
popular recipient. Like Quayle, Harding, George W. Bush, et al.,
Jackson was widely lampooned for his intellectual limitations, with
lots of inane remarks getting put in his mouth (e.g., "Elevate them
guns a little lower."). He was particularly ridiculed for being a poor
speller. Perhaps as a result, Jackson is commonly thought to have
said, "It is a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell
a word." No evidence confirms this.
Keyes concludes "Verdict: Old gag; not Twain's, probably not Jackson's, either."

Bill Mullins wrote:
> Andrew Jackson died 1845, so any use he made of the phrase
> would certainly antedate the 1855 cites below.

Victor Steinbok wrote
> True, but the only references I found were between 1874 and 1900. If
> I could find a verifiable citation, it would change the narrative.

During my search I also looked for Jackson attributions and found
several, but they occurred after the 1855 cites and hence after
Jackson's death as indicated. Twain was about twenty years old in
1855, but the quip was attached to his name at a later time according
to the imperfect evidence collected so far.

Garson

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 2:03 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: (Further) antedating quote about spelling
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 1/14/2010 12:51 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>>It's also possible that Andrew
>>Jackson and Mark Twain both used modified versions of the phrase later,
>>but there is no direct evidence for this and the original quip clearly
>>predates both of them.
>
> If there's no further antedating than EAN's Sept. 13, 1855, then
> surely Pres. and Gen. Andrew Jackson antedates the phrase, not vice versa.
>
> Joel
>
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