If you’re a native English speaker, the meaning of the previous sayings will be obvious, but such idiomatic expressions can present quite a challenge to new students of the language. Even with native speakers, though, the meaning of some metaphorical sayings could never be guessed without an explanation or an understanding of the context in which they were made. I challenge you to correctly interpret the meaning of a line that D. H. Lawrence wrote in a 1908 letter to Blanche Jennings:
Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life
with only one sail to catch the wind.
It’s a beautiful line, and I’m sure many readers could have a field day coming up with fanciful interpretations. In this line, though, Lawrence was talking about the value of being known by more than one first name. Ms. Jennings was known to everyone only by the name Blanche, and Lawrence felt this put her at a severe disadvantage. “One name is not sufficient for anyone,” he wrote, adding that he felt blessed to be known by seven names. Continuing the nautical metaphor, and combining it with a sartorial one, he expressed his good fortune this way:I am called Bertie, Bert, David, Herbert, Billy, William, and Dick; I am a full rigged schooner; I have a wardrobe as complete as the man’s-about-town.
In the pages to follow, we’ll be examining many more metaphorical neverisms. In some cases, the meaning will be readily apparent, as in Joseph Joubert’s classic warning about forcing a permanent solution on a temporary problem:
Never cut what you can untie.
In other cases, the meaning may not be clear, as in this popular Wall Street adage:
Never try to catch a falling knife.
This saying warns against buying a stock that is in free-fall. If you decide to make such a risky move, the consequences are likely to be similar to catching a falling knife with your bare hands—you will get bloody.
With some quotations, the metaphor does not appear in the first portion of the saying—where the word never actually occurs—but in the explanation:
Never give up;
for even rivers someday wash dams away.ARTHUR GOLDEN
Never mind trifles.
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Never despise the translator.
He’s the mailman of human civilization.ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
In other cases, the neverism appears at the end of an observation, after the way has been paved by a beautiful or important metaphorical thought:
Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade before the public.
Never clothe them in vulgar or shoddy attire.GEORGE W. CRANE
One should treat one’s fate as one does one’s health;
enjoy it when it is good, be patient with it when it is poor,
and never attempt any drastic cure save as an ultimate resort.FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
And with others, the metaphorical nature of the observation occurs because of personification, the longstanding practice of imbuing inanimate objects, animals, and abstract concepts with human qualities:
Never chase a lie.
Let it alone, and it will run itself to death.LYMAN BEECHER, American clergyman and father of
Harriet Beecher Stowe & Henry Ward Beecher
In the pages to follow, you will find more metaphorical admonitions. I’ll offer explanations of some, and brief commentary on others. I’ll let others stand on their own in order to let you exercise your own interpretive skill. If the meaning of a saying eludes you at first, don’t give up too soon. In my experience, there are few things more enjoyable than struggling over a quotation’s meaning—and then suddenly getting it.
Never play cat-and-mouse games if you’re a mouse.DON ADDIS, American cartoonist
Never place a period where God has placed a comma.GRACIE ALLEN
Never hammer a screw.STEPHEN ANDREW
Never let your mouth write a check that your body can’t cash.ANONYMOUS
This saying, which first emerged in the African-American subculture of the 1960s, is a hip extension of the saying Put up or shut up. There are a number of variants, with body being replaced by posterior, butt, and ass. The saying got a huge boost in popularity in the 1970s after Flip Wilson’s character “Geraldine” said it on The Flip Wilson Show. In Chili Dogs Always Bark at Night (1989), Lewis Grizzard offered this variation: “Never let your mind write a check your body can’t cash.”
Never stand between a dog and a fire hydrant.ANONYMOUS
Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy;
we do not value the sun for its height, but for its use.GAMALIEL BAILEY
This thought comes from an American physician who turned to what is now called advocacy journalism after he became an abolitionist. Bailey occupies an important footnote in history. In 1851, while editor of the abolitionist newspaper The New Organ, he began the serial publication of an antislavery novel by an unknown American writer named Harriett Beecher Stowe. Over the next forty weeks, the installments generated so much interest that in 1852, it was published as a full-length book. Uncle Tom’s Cabin galvanized public sentiment against slavery, selling 300,000 copies in its first year of publication, and eventually becoming the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century.
Never dull your shine for somebody else.TYRA BANKS, in a 2007 episode
of America’s Next Top Model
Never wrestle with a chimney sweep.TONY BENN, citing advice from his father
In 1993, Benn was a senior official in Great Britain’s Labour Party when he told a reporter that “The whole wisdom of humanity is summed up” in a number of sayings he heard as a child from his father. This one advised him to shun the dirty political tricks of his opponents. The advice is similar to Never wrestle with a pig, a saying featured earlier in the classic neverisms chapter. It also bears a resemblance to an admonition that sportswriter Grantland Rice commonly heard from his grandmother: “Never get into an argument about cesspools with an expert.” In the United States, people convey the same message when they say, “Never get into a pissing contest with a skunk.”