"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
This old piece weather humor used to be attributed to Mark Twain. But then quotation mavens determined it doesn’t exist in Twain’s works. Now, it’s generally attributed to American newspaper editor and author Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900).
The origin of both attributions is an editorial published in the August 24, 1897 issue of the Connecticut newspaper, the Hartford Courant.
The actual words of the editorial were: “A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.” Those words apparently morphed into the cliché we know today.
Warner was the editor of the Hartford Courant in 1987. He was also a good friend of Twain’s. So, it has been assumed that Warner wrote the editorial and that the “well known American” was Twain.
However, the editorial was unsigned. So, the truth is, while everybody talks about giving Warner or Twain credit for the old “everybody talks about the weather” bit, nobody seems to have done anything to decisively prove it.
BTW, some sources give the date of the editorial as August 27, 1897. But books I consider the most authoritative sources on quotations – like the The Yale Book of Quotations
