One for Sorrow (16 page)

When it first appeared in print in John Fitzherbert's
Boke of Husbandry
in 1523, this old adage seems to have been meant literally. ‘The dogge must lerne it when he is a whelpe, or els it wyl not be; for it is harde to make an olde dogge to stoupe,' he explained.
    But as with so many long-lasting pieces of farming wisdom, what started out as a simple observation of animal behaviour soon became adopted as a more broadly applicable piece of folklore. It was certainly being used figuratively by 1546, when habitual gatherer of proverbs John Heywood bagged it for his collection and spelt out its meaning as an expression of the impossibility of getting an elderly person to change their ways.
    In those days dogs were strictly working animals in rural communities and few farmers would have had time for teaching tricks. It wasn't until the late seventeenth century that the ‘new tricks' became part of the phrase, but once established, the wording stuck as we still use it in exactly this form today. Nowadays though it is most often used by the elderly themselves as a way of discouraging enthusiastic youngsters from trying to educate them in the use of modern technology which they have no desire to use.

This familiar warning against acting without thinking is thought to have its roots in
Æ
sop's fable ‘The Fox and the Goat', written in the fifth century
bc
. In the Middle Ages, when the phrase began to be used on its own as a proverb, the influence of Aesop on the moral conscience of the population was enormous. His fables were read and recited repeatedly, images from them were depicted on tapestries, carvings and sculptures and they even found their way into Christian and Catholic sermons, so it was a small step for the lessons they contained to become part of the rich body of folklore that guided so much of everyday life.
    In the story that gave rise to this phrase a fox falls into a well and can't get out. When a goat passes the well and asks the fox if the water is sweet, the fox describes how delicious it is and persuades the goat to come in and taste it. The goat takes the fox's recommendation at face value and without thinking about the fact that he won't be able to get out either, joins him in the well. The fox then tells the goat to let him climb on his back to get out of the well, promising to pull the goat up after him, the goat again complies, only for the fox to run off as soon as he is free, leaving the goat to languish at bottom of the well.
    The maxim appeared in an early manuscript dating back to around 1350 (Douce MS 52 no. 150) as ‘First loke and aftirward lepe'. And it is cited in
Obedience of Christian Man
(1528) by the first person to translate the Bible into English, William Tyndale: ‘We say . . . Loke yer thou lepe, whose literall sence is, doo nothinge sodenly or without avisement.'
    It was also associated from very early in its usage with that most momentous and un-take-backable of decisions: whom to marry. It appeared in John Heywood's 
Dialogue of Proverbs
of 1546 with the following verse:

And though they seeme wives

for you never so fit,

Yet let not harmfull haste so

far out run your wit:

But that ye harke to heare

all the whole summe

That may please or displease

you in time to cumme.

Thus by these lessons ye may

learne good cheape

In wedding and all things to

looke ere ye leaped.

Though this rhyme seems to have been forgotten, we still use the saying, delivered with a cautionary tone, to remind friends not to make hasty decisions that they won't be able to take back.

   

In the Middle Ages, goose was as popular as chicken at the tables of the upper classes. Even those who couldn't' afford the luxury of meat with every meal would eat the bird on special occasions, especially at Michaelmas and Whitsuntide. Little distinction was made in the medieval kitchen between the female goose and the male gander; both were roasted and were traditionally served with a sauce made either from dark prunes or cooked garlic.
    The phrase seems to have been used figuratively from the start to convey the idea that what is adequate for one person should be adequate for another and, more explicitly, that what's good enough for the woman of the household should be good enough for the man. An earlier saying expounding this message was recorded in John Heywood's
Dialogue of Proverbs
as ‘As well for the coowe calf as for the bull,' and by the time John Ray listed it in his collection of proverbs in 1670, it appeared with the explanatory note: ‘This is a woman's proverb.' Perhaps what he meant by this was that it was a proverb most likely to be used by women as they tried to persuade their husbands that being the man of the house didn't mean they deserved any kind of special treatment.
    These days we abbreviate the phrase to ‘What's sauce for the goose' and use it most often to express the need for equality.

Nautical wisdom features widely in folklore and as a consequence it has been mistakenly cited as the source of a number of proverbs which actually have their roots in the soil rather than the sea. This saying, which warns against risking something precious for the sake of a small additional investment, is one of them.
    Since ships could quite conceivably be spoiled through scrimping on the tar used to seal their hulls, a naval origin is very plausible. But this phrase actually comes from farming, not sailing. Before chemical disinfectants became available to farmers they used tar to seal wounds on their livestock (pigs, sheep, cattle) to prevent them from becoming infected. Try saying ‘sheep' in the sort of accent a rural Elizabethan peasant might have had and you'll see how the confusion arose. John Ray's
Collection of English Proverbs
(1670) featured the original:

Ne'er lose a hog for a half-penny-worth of tarre.

To which Ray added the comment: ‘Some have it, lose not a sheep. Indeed, tarre is more used about sheep than swine.'
    The phrase is still used to appeal to people not to risk the failure of an enterprise for the sake of a small piece of additional investment, but also in the broader context of human endeavour, to encourage people not to risk sacrificing a sensitive political deal or the resolution of a family feud for the sake of petty details.

   

When this still well-used proverb was first uttered the milk it referred to probably came from goats or sheep as cows' milk only became commonplace towards the end of the sixteenth century. Demand for milk was high because it was needed for making medieval essentials such as butter and cheese, but milking was done by hand and yielded small amounts compared to today's industrialized milking machines. This made the product a precious commodity and one you might well have felt the urge to shed a tear over if you or the goat you were milking had been the one to overturn the milk churn.
    In 1659, James Howell in his collection of proverbs,
Paramoigraphy
, recorded the saying as ‘No weeping for shed milk' which was put to use outside the milking shed to encourage people not to be unhappy about what couldn't be undone. The idea that it wasn't worth getting upset over things for which there was no remedy had been set out as early as 1484 in William Caxton's translation of
Æ
sop's
Fables
. He described as a doctrine the instruction to ‘take no sorowe of the thynge lost whiche may not be recouered'.
    Now, with the price of milk well within the means of most pockets, we often misinterpret the phrase and assume that the spilt milk in the proverb represents something of little value. With this idea in mind we tend to use the phrase when someone seems unduly upset over some small matter that really doesn't warrant losing sleep over, rather than over some mishap, possibly serious, that cannot be undone.

   

This warning against celebrating a victory before you are certain of it was being used in English by at least 1539, when it appeared in Richard Taverner's translation of the proverbs of Erasmus as ‘Many thynges fall betwene the cuppe and the mouth'. As this link with the famous Dutch scholar of Latin suggests, it found its way into English folklore from the mythology of Ancient Greece. Greek legend has it that the lesson in the proverb was learnt the hard way by a man who scoffed at a prophesy that he wouldn't live to drink the wine that came from his own vineyard. Having successfully tended his vines, harvested his grapes and produced his wine, he was about to sip from his glass and prove the prophesy false when he learned that a wild boar was running amok in his vineyard. So he set down his glass and ran outside to chase the boar off only for the animal to turn its attentions to him and gore him to death.
    While it's hard to imagine anything so dramatic occurring once you've got a wine glass in your hand in modern life, the metaphor is useful in certain business situations that shouldn't be taken for granted until the final signature has been signed (See also
‘Don't count your chickens before they've hatched'
) and is certainly applicable in all matters relating to house buying.

The earliest mention of this phrase in print came in Randle Cotgrave's English–French dictionary published in 1611. Alongside the 50,000 word definitions his book featured around 1500 proverbs, which provide a fascinating picture of the sayings in use at the time. Few are still recognizable today but this one is still used to warn against judging people by their outward appearance.
    The phrase was probably in use for several decades, if not centuries before Cotgrave recorded it, as the matter of how to build a good fire had been of great significance to man before the English language was even dreamt of. As with many pieces of country folklore, the saying came from observation of the way things worked rather than an understanding of why they worked, but we now know that the phrase is true for reasons relating to chemistry. To maintain a fire you need heat, fuel and oxygen and it's in the provision of this latter ingredient that crooked logs have the lead over straight ones. Firewood that is packed too densely won't burn well because the process of combustion relies on continuous access to oxygen. Crooked logs build natural air pockets into the fire so that it will maintain its heat and continue to burn smoothly.
    By 1694 the phrase had appeared in English writer and wit Thomas D'Urfey's
The comical history of Don Quixote
as ‘Crooked logs make good fires' spelling out even more clearly the benefits of crookedness – though our modern use of ‘crooked' as meaning corrupt or criminal doesn't apply.