WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT?

I grew up with a lot of what I'll call "canned wisdom"--old sayings and maxims and proverbs intended to improve me. We're not talking about eating your spinach here, or sitting up straight, or stop making that face because what if your face freezes like that. No-no. We're talking about well-known (and well-worn) phrases we heard all our lives and took for granted they were, well, practically gospel truth. Until we discovered they were something else entirely.

Today we'll look at seven phrases and their origins--not my Great Aunt Fanny's or Grandpa Joe's--the real origins.

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1. "Eyes bigger than your stomach." The original reads "bigger than your belly." Found a reference to the poet George Herbert (1593-1633) but nothing about where in his work it's to be found.

2. "Bite off more than you can chew."  Found no references, sad to say. But I think it's safe to assume we're not talking food here--I know it was used in my youth as a warning not to be too ambitious because I'd not likely succeed. (I still think that's bad advice--what about our reach exceeding our grasp?--Robert Browning)

3. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you."  First seen in print in about the early 1800s; political writer Edmund Burke said “having looked to government for bread, on the first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.” The term is believed to be hundreds of years old.

[So far we seem to be inundated with advice on our feeding and eating habits. But once we get into the origins, we learn something else.]

4. "Give him an inch and he'll take a mile." Already a proverb in John Heywood's 1546 collection, "Give him an inch and he'll take an ell." [An ell is a former English unit of length, about 45 inches.] The change to mile happened in about 1900.

5. "Walk a mile in my shoes."  Original said "in my moccasins." Same difference. Possibly from an 1895 poem by Mary T. Lathrap called “Judge Softly.”

6. "A penny saved is a penny earned." Attributed to Ben Franklin, but I couldn't substantiate that. Anyway--it's bum advice--100% earnings? No way!

7. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."Probable that John Heywood (see #4 above) obtained the phrase from a Latin text of St. Jerome, The Letter to the Ephesians, circa AD 400."

[NOTE: Sources were: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and Webster's Tenth Edition dictionary.]

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There you have them--seven pieces of advice/wisdom/opinion/or (if you're one of the skeptics in this life) so much codswollop.

But now that it's spring in the northern hemisphere, and especially up north in the U.S., we will have rain-rain-rain. So I leave you with this wisdom: "Always save something for a rainy day." Heaven knows, you're gonna need it.

Blessings from

Thursday's Child