Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

Josh Billings was the pen name of Henry Wheeler Shaw (born 21 April 1818, Lanesborough, Massachusetts; died 14 October 1885, Monterey, California), one of the most widely read American humorists of the post–Civil War decades. His signature device was eccentric phonetic spelling — “iz” for is, “tew” for to, “beleave” for believe — wrapped around aphorisms sharp enough to survive the joke. That spelling is exactly why his best lines kept getting handed to other people: for most of the last century and a half, a reader searching for “it is better to know nothing” had no way to reach “it iz better tew know nothing,” so the sentence circulated unmoored from its author — long enough for four other humorists to be given the credit before quotation databases started indexing both spellings.