Old proverbs Made New

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 9, 1 March 1926, Page 47

Old proverbs Made New

STEPHEN LEACOCK

IT has occurred to me that somebody ought to get busy and rewrite our national proverbs. They are all out of date. They don’t fit any longer. Indeed, many of them are precisely the converse of existing facts.

Our proverbs have come down to us from the days of long ago; days when the world was very primitive and very simple and very different; when people never moved more than a mile and a half from home and were all afraid of the dark; and when wisdom was handed out by old men with white whiskers, called prophets, every one of whom would be “retired’ nowadays by any firstclass board of trustees as past the age-limit of common sense.

But in those days all the things that were said by these wise old men, who had never seen a motorcar, were gathered up and called proverbs and repeated by all the common people as the last words of wisdom. The result is that even today we still go on repeating them, without realising how hopelessly they are off the track.

Take, as a first sample, the proverb that is perhaps the best known in our language: Birds of a feather flock together.

But they don’t. Ask any first-class naturalist. If the wise old men had taken another look they would have seen that the last thing birds ever want to do is to flock together. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they keep away from their own species, and only flock when it is absolutely necessary. So much for the birds. But the proverb is really supposed to refer to people, and then it is wrong again. People “of a feather’’ do not flock together. Tall men fall in love with little women. A girl with a beautiful fair skin and red hair marries a man who looks like a reformed orang-outang. A clergyman makes a friend of an auctioneer, and a banker would rather spend a day with a Scotch gillie than with a whole vaultful of bankers. Forgers, in their time off, go and sing in the choir, and choirmasters, when they are not singing, go to the races.

IN short, there is nothing in the proverb whatsoever. It ought to be revised under the modern conditions to read:

“Birds of any particular feather and persons of any particular character or occupation show, upon the whole, a disposition rather to seek out something dissimilar to their own appearance and nature than to consort with something homologous to their own essential entity.”

In that shape one has a neat, workable proverb. Try another: A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Entirely wrong again. This was supposed to show that a young man

who wandered from home never got on in the world. In very ancient days it was true. The young man who stayed at home and worked hard and tilled the ground and goaded oxen with a long stick like a lance found himself as he grew old a man of property, owning four goats and a sow. The son who wandered forth in the world was either killed by the cannibals or crawed home years afterwards doubled up with rheumatism. So the old men made the proverb. But nowadays it is exactly wrong. It is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. It is the ambitious boy who trudges off to the city, leaving his elder brother in the barnyard, who later on makes a fortune and founds a university.

T N short, in modern life it is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. And the geologists of Tennesseesay that the moss on the actual stone was first started in exactly the same way. It was the rolling of the stone that smashed up the earth and made the moss grow.

Take another proverb: All is not gold that glitters. How perfectly ridiculous 1 Everybody in the days in which we live knows— even a child knowsthat all is gold that glitters. Put on clothes enough, appearance enough, pretence enough, and you will be accepted everywhere. Just do a little glittering, and everybody will think you are gold. Make a show, be a humbug, and you will succeed so fast that presently, being very wealthy and prominent, you will really think yourself a person of great merit and intellect. In other words, the glitter makes the gold. That is all there is to it. .Gold is really one of the most useless of all material objects. Even now we have found no real use for it, except to fill our teeth. Any other employment of it is just glitter. So the proverb might be revised to read :

“Every thing or person may be said to stand in high esteem and to pass at a high value, provided that it or he makes a sufficient show, glitter, or appearance, the estimation being in inverse ratio to the true quantitative measurement of the reality of it, them, or her.’’ That makes a neat, workable proverb, expressed with up-to-date accuracy.

OR here is another famous proverb that is exactly the contrary of truth: People zuho live in glass houses should not throzv stones.

Not at all. They are the very people who ought to throw stones and to keep on throwing them all the time. They ought to keep up such a fusilade of stones from their glass house that no one can get near it.

Or if the proverb is taken to mean

that people who have faults of their own ought not to talk of other people’s faults, it is equally mistaken. They ought to talk of other people’s faults all the time so as to keep attention away from their own. OUT the list of proverbs is so ■*-* long that it is impossible to do more than make a casual mention of a few others. “One swallow does not make a summer.” Perhaps not. But there are ever so many occasions when one swallow—just one single swallow—is better than nothing to drink at all. And if you get enough of them they do make a summer. “Charity begins at home.” Perfectly ridiculous. Watch any modern city householder when a beggar comes to his door. Charity begins

with the Federated Charities Office, or with the Out-of-Work Mission, or with the City Hall, or, if need be, with the Police Courtin short, anywhere but at home. Our whole effort is now to keep charity as far from home as possible. “It is a wise child that knows its own father.” Not at all. Alter this and make it read: “It is a very silly boy who isn’t wise to his old man.” ‘Even a worm will turn at last.” Wrong. It turns at once, immediately. It never waits. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Yes; but a bird in a good restaurant is worth ten of either of them. Therethat’s enough. Any reader of this paper may go on having iun with the other proverbs. I give them to him.