flâneur

Extrapolation

dsimanek.vialattea.net · 610 words · saved by 1 readers

Excerpt from Twain's book Life on the Mississippi, on dangers of extrapolation.

by Mark Twain The last line of this excerpt from Life on the Mississippi is often quoted as an example of the dangers of extrapolation. Here it is in context. One of the Mississippi's oddest peculiarities is that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide…

saved by

related reading