a baby with a hammer

[Ben Zimmer]

Both the Yale Book of Quotations and the ADS-L archives will direct
you to this attribution:

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat
everything as if it were a nail.
--Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance ch. 2 (1966)

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0705D&L=ADS-L&P=8677


On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 11:03 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am with Wilson on this one and believe that "a baby with a hammer" is
> an innovation, a variant on an old proverb. Of course, "old" could mean
> 30 year or 200. But it's certainly well before 1997 (my college years
> predate that by 10+ years and that's where *I* learned the expression).
>
> Sure enough, two of the top three GB hits pre-1990 are from different
> issues of InfoWorld.
>
> Unsurprisingly, the first appears in the July 9, 1984, issue in a letter
> responding specifically to a slightly different version in a June 4 article:
>
> "When you've got a hammer, you look for some nails."
>
> The author suggests two other variants. One supposedly original and one
> was suggested as applying better "to our profession" (programmer):
>
> "When you've got a good hammer, everything looks like a nail."
> "When you've got a good hammer, you beat everything to death."
>
> Another letter appeared on August 20, 1984, "correcting" the previously
> issued versions.
>
> "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
>
> Of course, /this/ writer blames it all on ... Mark Twain.
>
> Needless to say, this "old aphorism" soon became a metaphor for
> technological change--which is, in turn, why I first heard it in college
> (MIT).
>
> That's not all. GB also gives as 1984 the pub date for Allan Cohen's
> Effective Behavior in Organizations. His quote is a bit different and
> yet somehow familiar:
>
> > To a child with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
>
> A publication that may or may not be a RAND Corporation paper from 1980
> replaces "child" with "small boy".
>
> A 1982 pub calls it "The Law of the Hammer", yet, in 1976, it was
> already known as "The Law of the Tool" (and, yes, tied to technological
> change). GB claims that the earliest appearance--and the earliest
> reference to Mark Twain can be found in The Economist in 1973: The
> Economist, Volume 384, Issues 8544-8548 (no page given, but it's nice to
> narrow it to just 4 issues, at least, theoretically). I have not
> verified the accuracy of this record. The snippet appears in the
> preview, but not on the page.
>
> http://bit.ly/aqcCoV
> > To a man with a hammer, Mark Twain once said, everything looks like a
> > nail. One hammer that has seen lots of use in recent years is the type
> > of mathematical relationship known as a power-law distribution.
>
> Well, here's the obvious question--if it /was/ Mark Twain, how come
> there are no earlier records /in books/??
>
> Several other appearances, dated in the 1980s, identify an old
> proverb/aphorism or a "well-known surgeon" as the source. One attributes
> it to Maslow. (http://bit.ly/dgIlFa) Actually, make that two.
> (http://bit.ly/aRPdVq --coincidentally, both also in 1984.)
>
> Google News Archives are not of much help.
>
>     VS-)
>
> On 11/4/2010 2:08 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> > <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> 1997 C. Fred Alford _What Evil Means to Us_ (Ithaca: Cornell U. P.) 4: A man
> >> with a method is like a baby with a hammer. Everything looks like a nail. I
> >> trust I am not this baby, but my method frames the manuscript.
> >>
> > How about the variant, "To a man who has a hammer, everything looks
> > like a nail"? I heard it on some TV drama. I remember it because, at
> > the time, it struck me as a very lame attempt to portray deep,
> > Oriental, philosophical thinking of the "Confucius-say" type.
> >
> > I'd google it myself, but I'm trying to catch up on a multitude of
> > e-mails and do a wash at the same time. :-)
> >

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