Never make a negative decision in the low time.
Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods.
Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.
Never let go of the fiery sadness called desire.PATTI SMITH, from a poem in her 1978 book Babel
Never thrust your own sickle into another’s corn.PUBLILIUS SYRUS
This ancient maxim is often viewed as a sexual metaphor, in part because of the word thrust and also because early translations said “another man’s corn.” To the best of my knowledge, though, it was originally offered as a straightforward “thou shalt not steal” injunction.
Never be so simple as to seek for happiness:
it is not a bird that you can put in a cage.
By so doing you will only clip its wings.CAITLIN THOMAS
Thomas, the widow of Dylan Thomas, wrote this in her Not Quite Posthumous Letter to My Daughter (1963), a book written to her eighteen-year-old daughter. She continued:If happiness comes at alclass="underline" which is by no means prearranged; it comes by the way, while you are seeking for something else. Something outside yourself, beyond yourself: in a brief absorption of self-forgetfulness. And, when it comes, you probably won’t recognize it, till afterwards.
Never wound a snake; kill it.HARRIET TUBMAN, in 1862, on the advice she would
give to President Lincoln on the institution of slavery
“Never Offer Your Heart to Someone Who Eats Hearts”ALICE WALKER, title of 1978 poem
Never don’t do nothin’ which isn’t your fort,
for ef you do, you’ll find yourself
splashin’ around in the canawl, figgeratively speakin’.ARTEMUS WARD
Artemus Ward was a popular nineteenth-century humorist who numbered Abraham Lincoln among his fans. Ward was also believed to have served as an early inspiration for Mark Twain. He was noted for speaking and writing in a phonetic dialect.
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness,
but come down into the green valleys of silliness.LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Never commit “the sin of the desert.”ZIG ZIGLAR, in Ziglar on Selling (1993)
“The sin of the desert” is knowing where the water is but not sharing the information.
eighteen
Never Use a Long Word Where a Short One Will Do
The Literary Life
On a chilly November morning in 1867, the fifty-eight-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered a lecture to students at the Harvard Medical School. Professor Holmes, who had received a medical degree from Harvard three decades earlier, had been on the faculty since 1847, and he served as dean of the school since 1853.
A respected figure in the field of medicine, Holmes was even better known in the general culture for his literary efforts. He first received national attention in 1830 as a twenty-one-year-old Boston lawyer (he would soon abandon his plans for a legal career and decide to become a physician). Outraged at learning that U.S. Navy authorities were planning to decommission and dismantle the USS Constitution, he wrote a poem in protest and sent it to a Boston newspaper. Titled “Old Ironsides,” the poem was soon reprinted in newspapers all over America. Almost overnight, Holmes’s impassioned poetic effort mobilized public sentiment against the navy’s plans, and the ship was ultimately preserved as a historic monument. Today, 180 years after the poem’s publication, the USS Constitution, still affectionately known as “Old Ironsides,” is the world’s oldest commissioned ship still in service. And the historic vessel lives on in large part as a result of the efforts of this one man.
In 1858, while teaching full-time at the medical school, Holmes came out with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, a collection of essays originally written for The Atlantic Monthly. The book was enthusiastically received by critics, who began describing Holmes as a major American essayist. It was also a great commercial success, selling 10,000 copies in the first three days of publication. A sequel, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, appeared two years later, and a third volume, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, followed in 1872.
In his 1867 lecture, Holmes was speaking about medicine, but his experiences as a writer clearly informed his ideas. Near the end of his talk, he urged the students to avoid pretension and to describe things simply and plainly:
I would never use a long word . . .
where a short one would answer the purpose.
I know there are professors in this country who “ligate” arteries.
Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.
Over the following decades, the notion of using short words instead of long ones became a rule of thumb for writers, but it was turned into a formal rule of writing in April 1946, when Horizon magazine published an essay titled “Politics and the English Language,” by the English writer George Orwell.
At the time, Orwell was moderately well known in England as a journalist and essayist, but he was not even close to achieving the international fame that would come three years later with the publication of his dystopian classic 1984. Even though his satirical novel Animal Farm had been published the previous year in England, it was still unclear how successful the book would be (an American edition was in production, but not yet out).
After the success of 1984, Orwell became an internationally famous writer, and renewed interest was paid to his earlier writings, including the 1946 Horizon essay, a powerful polemic on the abuse of language and the effect of bad writing. In the piece, Orwell argued that sloppy thinking and bad writing not only go together, they mutually reinforce one another:A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
The article concluded with six rules for writers, now commonly called “Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing.” Four were expressed neveristically, and one can be traced back to that famous 1867 lecture from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes:1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.