[Ads-l] "There is a sucker born every 15 minutes."

[Laurence Horn]

> On Aug 29, 2015, at 5:20 PM, Joel Berson <berson at att.net> wrote:
> 
> Does that mean that only one of every fifteen customers of Barnum was a sucker?  Impossibly few.
> 
> Joel

Well, according to this quote Barnum wasn't explicitly specifying his own customers.  Some of them may have been customers for subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post, Cadillacs, or mail-order lobsters, and perhaps fewer than 1/15 of those were suckers, so presumably it averaged out.

LH
> 
>      From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
> Sent: Saturday, August 29, 2015 4:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [ADS-L] "There is a sucker born every 15 minutes."
> 
>> On Aug 29, 2015, at 3:50 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>> 
>> It's amazing the amount of fresh information available on line. According
>> to Anne-Marie Hislop - no, I don't know who she is - the above was said by
>> P. T. Barnum.
>> 
> And according to the best internet wisdom, or maybe the second best, what Barnum said was "There's a customer born every minute", which of course is consistent with, but distinct from, the sucker stat.  
> 
> On the other hand, wikipedia informs us, : 'There's a sucker born every minute' is a phrase most likely spoken by David Hannum, in criticism of both P. T. Barnum, an American showman of the mid 1800s, and his customers."  YMMV.  (Haven't checked QI on this.)
> 
> LH
> 
> 
> 
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