Do you wish men to speak well of you?
Then never speak well of yourself.BLAISE PASCAL, in Pensées (1658)
Never touch your eye but with your elbow.ENGLISH PROVERB
Since we cannot touch our eye with an elbow, this saying attempts to add some levity to the age-old advice about not touching your eye with anything at all. A related Chinese proverb advises: “Never pick your nose or your ear but with your elbow.”
Never trust a woman who mentions her virtue.FRENCH PROVERB
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.WILLIAM SAFIRE
This tongue-in-cheek recommendation was inspired by the George Orwell line, “Never use a long word when a short one will do.” In this parody, the rule is laid out and violated in the same breath. In a 1979 “On Language” column, Safire provided a number of these “perverse rules of grammar.” In Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage (1990), he provided a few more self-contradicting rules:
Never generalize.
Remember to never split an infinitive.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Never use prepositions to end sentences with.
Never do anything virtuous until you minimize the damage you will do.EDGAR SCHNEIDER
Never speak ill of yourself! You can count on your friends for that.CHARLES-MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND
Typically, it is enemies who say bad things about us, so this quip from the famous nineteenth-century French statesman points to a fascinating human phenomenon—many of our friends derive a certain pleasure from either speaking ill of us themselves or passing along the negative comments of others. The Canadian journalist and humorist Bob Edwards was clearly inspired by Talleyrand’s observation when he wrote: “Never exaggerate your faults; your friends will attend to that.”
Never economize on luxuries.ANGELA THIRKELL, attributed
Never have children, only grandchildren.GORE VIDAL, quoting his grandfather
The line is often attributed directly to Vidal, but he heard it from his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma (the first blind U.S. senator). The senator had two children, Nina and Thomas, but he was not close with either of them. When Nina’s first marriage resulted in the birth of young Gore Vidal in 1925, the senator took a genuine interest in his first grandchild. As the years passed, when the precocious grandson served as both a reader and a guide for his grandfather, the two became very close. In Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995), Vidal wrote:His son and daughter had always been annoying to him and of little consequence to anyone else, while I, who read to him gladly, had been a treasure.
Sometime during his early school years, Vidal began to hear his grandfather offering the never have children, only grandchildren line to many people. After Vidal achieved fame, he always mentioned the origin of the saying, but many regarded it as so quintessentially Vidal that they found it easier to cite him as the author.
seventeen
Never Cut What You Can Untie
Metaphorical Neverisms
In a 1941 press conference in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa, Winston Churchill said: “The organ grinder still has hold of the monkey’s collar.” Churchill was describing the relationship between the German dictator Adolf Hitler and the Italian premier Benito Mussolini, and this was his way of saying that Mussolini was nothing more than Hitler’s lackey.
Churchill often expressed himself in figurative language, and the metaphor of the monkey and the organ grinder showed up frequently in his writings and remarks. In Safire’s Political Dictionary (1988), William Safire reported that Churchill was once asked by the British ambassador to Rome if, during an upcoming visit to Italy, he was planning to raise an issue directly with Mussolini or with Mussolini’s foreign minister. Churchill replied:
Never hold discussions with the monkey
when the organ grinder is in the room.
When people speak metaphorically, they are communicating on two different levels simultaneously. In this case, Churchill was literally making an observation about monkeys and organ grinders while figuratively reminding people that they should not waste time with an underling when they can talk directly with that person’s superior. If he had said never waste time dealing with a lapdog, he would have used another metaphor to make the same point.
The difference between literal and figurative language may also be seen in these words from one of history’s most famous fictional characters:
Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last.
When Cervantes put these words into the mouth of Don Quixote, the legendary Man of La Mancha wasn’t making an observation about bird hunting, but rather describing the danger of walking into the future with one’s eyes on the past.
I examined metaphorical language in a previous book, I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like (2008). A saying is metaphorical when it describes one thing by relating it to something else, or when it makes a connection between two apparently different things—as in this Winston Churchill quotation:
Smoking cigars is like falling in love;
first you are attracted to its shape;
you stay with it for its flavor;
and you must always remember never, never let the flame go out.
This remark was a true feat of association, the first time anyone had ever established a link between smoking cigars and falling in love. After stating the resemblance between the two disparate activities, Churchill pursued the metaphor, by talking about shape and flavor. And then in the beautiful concluding line, he offered a literal tip to cigar smokers and a metaphorical one to lovers. The final line illustrates the essential characteristic of metaphorical language—at one level, the saying communicates one message, and at another level something quite different. This business of saying one thing but meaning another is often called “indirect communication.” It is the hallmark of many proverbial sayings.
Below are five classic proverbs, all examples of metaphorical language:
Never cross a bridge until you come to it.
Never burn your bridges behind you.
Never make a mountain out of a molehill.
Never bite the hand that feeds you.
Never put the cart before the horse.
Indirect communication is also the essential method by which, for many centuries, fables, allegories, and parables have transmitted moral lessons:
Never count your chickens before they’re hatched.
This saying comes from a famous Aesop fable. A young maid carrying a pail of milk to market begins daydreaming about what she’ll buy from the sale of the milk. The money can be used to buy eggs, she thinks, which will then produce many chickens, which then might fetch a handsome price when sold at market. With all of that money, she could buy a fancy dress that would impress all the young men. But when the young men make advances, she will toss her head back proudly and refuse them. In this proud-thinking moment, she shook her head back in unison with the thought—and the pail fell off her head and spilled the milk on the ground. The moral of the story in most early versions was: “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.” Today, though, the lesson is just as likely to begin with never as with don’t. The saying is literally about counting chickens and figuratively about being overly optimistic. From the seventeenth century, a similar proverb has advised, “Never cackle till your egg is laid.”