Vice President Dan Quayle put a light-hearted spin on his misspelling of the word potato Thursday by paraphrasing Mark Twain. Despite reports to the contrary, Quayle knew what he was talking about.
In an interview with San Francisco's KRON television station, Quayle said, "I should have caught the mistake on that spelling bee card," a reference to the error earlier in the week, when he directed 12-year-old William Figueroa to add an "e" to the word potato.Quayle added, "But as Mark Twain once said: `You should never trust a man who has one way to spell a word."'
Original press accounts of Quayle's remarks, including the UPI dispatch from San Francisco, quoted Twain scholars who said they found no similar citation to the remark offered by the vice president.