This post hits a trifecta of LLOG themes: the troublesome interaction of multiple negations with scalar predicates that we call "misnegation"; the flexible phrasal or conceptual templates we call "snowclones"; and the multiplication of careless variant quotations.
It started when a friend, in conversation, said something like "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. [pause] Or overestimating. Whatever."
To start with, I took a look around for other over-under confusions with respect to this quotation. The bulk of the versions use "underestimating the intelligence", but there are plenty of overestimations as well. From a N.Y. Daily News column:
For years the people who run boxing have ridden two axioms by P.T. Barnum all the way to the bank. The first being there's a sucker born every minute. And the second is that no one ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American people.
From a sports story in The Scotsman:
As H L Mencken, with reference to his fellow Americans, once memorably observed: "Nobody ever went broke by overestimating the intelligence of the public."
A Guardian correction:
In a story about drugs in sport - Exposure risks new batch of cheats, page 33, Sport, October 24 - we wrote: "As the consummate American huckster PT Barnum once said: Nobody ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American public." What HL Mencken said was "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
Other replications vary in many other dimensions:
Nobody ever lost money by overestimating the taste of the American public.
No one ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American people.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
No one ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
No one ever went broke underestimating the public intelligence.
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American middle class.
There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
And third, no one in Hollywood ever lost money by overestimating the intelligence of the American public.
I guess what P.T. Barnum said still holds true "no one ever lost money overestimating the intelligence of the American public".
So then I wondered what the original quotation really was, and where it first appeared. I didn't succeed in nailing down the answer to either of those questions, but here are some clues:
Vincent Fitzpatrick, 'H.L. Mencken', in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 137: American Magazine Journalists, 1900-1960, 1994, gives the quotation in this form:
No one in the world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the plain people.
John Leland, Hip: The History, 2005, gives it this way:
No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the plain people.
Roger Lathbury, American Modernism (1910-1945), 2006, gives this form:
No one in the world, so far as I know . . . has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Whatever the original really was, many people have produced creative variants. Among the many things that nobody (or no one) ever went broke (or lost money) by underestimating are these:
the insecurities of gay consumers
the gullibility of Facebook users
the need of Americans for the Effortless Solution
the vapidity of the American newsmedia
the anxiety women feel about getting married
the desperation of composers
the Bush administration's capacity for doing the wrong thing
Tony Romo's ability to absolutely puke away winnable games
the intolerance levels of the Daily Mail readership
the motivation of The American Freshman
students' calculational skills
the Christmas single market
the spine of congressional democrats
And among the many things that nobody ever went broke by overestimating:
the neurotic stupidity of Floridians
the foolishness of any given group of people
the laziness of the American public
the gullibility of the American public
the racism of Today's GOP
the self-absorption of the Democratic Party
the vulgarity of the American people
how bad people could be
the heartfelt panic that the average woman feels about her body
Americans' ability to value fantasy over reality
the treason of the democrat party
the desperate unhappiness of the American public
the political knowledge of the people
the appetite of Texans for red meat
Note that in both directions, the majority of these are things that on balance one would rather have less of. (I've put in red the quantities that seem clearly to be negatively evaluated.)
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