Whatever Happened to Common Wisdom?

Once upon a time in our language, we had these things called aphorisms. Adages. Sayings. Collectively, they were known as "common wisdom". We all knew these things, and yet had to remind one another of them periodically. For instance, a mother or father, bemoaning their child's bad grades and wanted to blame it on how "slotted" their attention has become because of TV, video games, Twitter, etc., might say "The slotted spoon doesn't hold much soup." Their friend, wanting to remind them to look at their OWN grades in high school might respond "Well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

Some of these aphorisms became changed over time to mean something else. For instance, have you ever heard someone dismiss someone else by quoting Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake"? Well, that's not about haughtiness. That's about being out of touch. When a representative of the French peasants came to her and told her that her people had no bread, she was genuinely puzzled and said "They have no bread? Well, let them eat cake." They cut off her head for it. Or "the proof's in the pudding"? Yuck. Sounds like some bad pudding. Actually, "the proof of the pudding is in the tasting". One of my favorite aphoristic slaughters is "You can't have your cake and eat it, too." Of course you can. That's patently false. As a matter of fact, you'd have a hard time eating your cake if you DIDN'T have it. As a matter of fact, the saying is actually "You can't EAT your cake and HAVE it, too." Meaning you can either have it or eat it. Once you've eaten it, you can no longer have it.

I think that part of the death of aphorisms is the fact that we don't really want to think about what they represent in our modern culture. We desperately WANT to eat our cake and still have it.

One that has fallen seriously out of favor, for instance, is "You get what you pay for", meaning if you pay for low quality you can't complain about getting low quality. We want to believe that we can pay for cheap, Chinese junk (no pun intended) at WalMart and get quality products without compromising our own economy. It doesn't work.

Another one is "a stitch in time saves nine", meaning that if a rip starts in your clothes and you put a single stitch in now, the rip might not become worse and require nine stitches later. This has been replaced with "use it up, throw it away and buy a new one".

Yes, this relates to how we elect our representatives. Another aphorism, this one directly attributed to "Moms" Mabley is "If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got."

Peace.

Randal