WRITING WRONGS

Some time ago, I embarked on a campaign, no, a mission, to right the wrongs done to our rich heritage of clever and colorful sayings, maxims, idioms, witticisms, adages, postulates, guiding principles and good-old-boy commentaries (collectively, “Axioms”). Whether these injuries to our language were inflicted by the passage of time, unauthorized modifications, ignorance, indifference, misunderstandings or other mutative processes, the impact has been the same: basic tools of communication have been defiled and corrupted. I felt these adulterations had to be cleansed.

Recognizing I was but a very small voice in the wilderness, I nevertheless committed to the quest with a zero tolerance approach and a determination to expose to public scrutiny and contempt any and all Axiom contaminations which came to my attention. Circumstances and a dwindling resolve caused me to suspend the mission for a number of years; but I have now determined to resume this daunting task, with my blog readers, if any, as my initial target audience. I have high expectations that others will join forces with me along the way and that, in time, a veritable groundswell of support will transform my feeble, though noble, undertaking into a cause celebre with international literary implications. With significant help from The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, the journey begins today, however modestly, as follows:

“I don’t know him from Adam,” is a hopelessly dull and colorless mutant derivative of the expression “I don’t know him from Adam’s off ox.” The former simply says “I don’t know him.” The latter delivers a more forceful message, particularly if the historical development of the phrase is understood. The “off ox” in a team of oxen is the one on the right, away from, and presumably less familiar to, the driver. Also, the off ox was not seen as well by the driver and often got poorer footing as a result, leading to a related expression by farmers that a not-so-nimble person was “clumsy as an off ox” and later simply “clumsy as an ox.” But, I digress. In England prior to the colonization of America, the expression “poor as God’s off ox” meant that a person was very poor indeed. When the saying made its way to our country, “Adam” was substituted as a euphemism for “God” and the subject expression evolved from there.

“Revenge is sweet” is a distorted misinterpretation of the original thoughts of John Milton expressed in Paradise Lost: “Revenge, at first though sweet, bitter ere long upon itself recoils.” I believe Milton meant that it was pleasant to contemplate and plan for revenge, but bitter in the consummation. Dissenters will likely point to the fact that Shakespeare himself used the offending phrase; and they would be close to the truth. He actually said, in King Henry V , “O! a kiss / Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!” In that context, the Bard was not dealing with the subject of revenge as he did at length in what is probably the quintessential revenge story of all time, Hamlet, wherein he said “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.” Thus, I do not find Milton and Shakespeare to be at odds on the subject.

The adage “the proof is in the pudding,” standing alone, never made any sense to me, but I made little of it, believing there was some explanatory derivation of which I was simply unaware. After hearing the nonsensical phrase uttered three times within a two day span, I decided to do some research. It didn’t take long to discover that the real quotation, which makes perfectly good sense, was from Cervantes in Don Quixote: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” The mutative processes that conspired to corrupt this Q-uote (sorry about that) are unknown, but likely were based on a compulsion to abbreviate (which compulsion, somewhat ironically, is a form of laziness).

To the manor born is an understandably misused phrase because it is at least susceptible to a logical interpretation, if you merely mean “born to high estate or riches” – these being symbolized, of course, by the manor house. However, to the manner born is the original and correct phrasing, since the meaning of the expression is actually “fitted by birth or endowment for a certain position in life.” As Hamlet puts it (here we go with the Shakespeare again): “But to my mind – though I am native here/ And to the manner born – it is a custom/ More honored in the breach than the observance.” Correcting this particular Axiom distortion will be somewhat more difficult than usual due to the popularity of an old BBC television program regrettably entitled “To The Manor Born”.

I invite each of you to join with me in this literary mission of mercy. As a group, which I have tentatively named “Advocates Against Axiom Abuse” or “Foray”, we can make a real difference.