San Francisco, seen from Twin Peaks, with the fog of the marine layer rolling in
2 October 2023
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
—Mark Twain
Open up just about any guidebook or web site about San Francisco and you’ll find this quote. The trouble is, Twain never said it, or at least it doesn’t appear in any of his published works or extant letters and papers. The quote is sometimes attributed to other writers and other cities, but the clear favorite is Twain and San Francisco. (Twain is a “quote magnet,” with hundreds of quotations by others falsely attributed to him.)
But Twain did write about San Francisco’s climate, and his conclusions were completely at odds with this alleged quote. From his 1872 Roughing It:
The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets in Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth—if you have it—in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in one month than the other. You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world.
While San Francisco does get a bit chillier in than the surrounding counties, particularly when the marine layer of fog covers the city—visitors to the city are advised to pack a sweater no matter the month—it never gets really cold in summer or in winter. Twain was right; the climate of the Bay Area is delightful year-round.
Twain did, however, say something similar about Paris. In an 1880 letter he wrote:
For this long time I have been intending to congratulate you fervently upon your translation to——to——anywhere——for anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the Damnable. More than a hundred years ago somebody asked Quin, “Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?” “Yes,” said he, “Last summer.” I judge he spent his summer in Paris.
But here, it is Twain who is paraphrasing someone else, in this case actor James Quin (1693–1766). Quin’s quip, which doesn’t refer to a specific location, was evidently in circulation in Twain’s day. We even see it in a 1789 letter by English politician Horace Walpole, son of Robert Walpole, who had served as prime minister:
But St. Swithin [i.e., 15 July] played the devil so, that we could not stir out of doors, and had fires to chase the watery spirits. Quin, being once asked if he had ever seen so bad a winter, replied, “Yes, just such an [sic] one last summer!”—and here is its youngest brother!
The current phrasing, naming a specific city, came into being at the turn of the twentieth century, only it was in relation to Duluth, Minnesota, not San Francisco or Paris. From Duluth’s News-Tribune of 17 June 1900:
One of these days somebody will tell that mouldy chestnut about the finest winter he ever saw being the summer he spent in Duluth, and one of these husky commercial travelers, who have been here and know all about our climate, will smite him with an uppercut and break his slanderous jaw. The truth will come out in time.
But even here, the use of mouldy chestnut indicates that by this date the attribution to Duluth was an unoriginal and tired one. And it was widespread. Here is one from Lexington, Kentucky’s Morning Herald of 17 June 1901 that tells of R. Q. Grant who worked for the state weather bureau:
Another assignment was to Duluth, Minn., where he learned to appreciate rapid changes in temperature. He says the coldest winter he ever experienced was the summer he spent in Duluth.
And San Francisco, Paris, and Duluth are not alone. The quip has been attributed to a number of cities over the years. The phrase is what linguists have dubbed a snowclone, that is a formulaic, cliché in which a familiar idiom is modified to fit new circumstances. A classic example is X is the new Y, where the two variables can be substituted, as in blue is the new black.
For a fuller history of this and other dubious quotations, see the Quote Investigator.
Sources:
“Interesting Experiences. Morning Herald (Lexington, Kentucky), 17 June 1901, 6/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
O’Toole, Garson. “The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent Was a Summer in San Francisco.” Quote Investigator (blog), 30 November 2011.
Sunday News-Tribune (Duluth, Minnesota), 17 June 1900, 12/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Twain, Mark (pseud. Samuel Clemens). Letter to Lucius Fairchild, 28 April 1880. Mark Twain Project.
———. Roughing It. Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing, 1872, 410. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Walpole, Horace. Letter to Miss Berry, 31 July 1789. The Letters of Horace Walpole, vol. 6 of 6. London: Samuel Bentley, 1840, 333–34. Google Books.
Photo credit: Brocken Inaglory, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.