Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the proverb: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I suppose the antique syntax baffled them.
Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the proverb: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I suppose the antique syntax baffled them.
They probably wouldn’t get ‘Penny wise, pound foolish’ or ‘Don’t spoil a sheep for a ha’porth of tar’ either. It is in the nature of proverbs to embody archaisms, and antiquarianism is quite alien to the current generation, for all its interest in Timewatch.
‘If the fox be crafty, more crafty is he that catches him,’ is a pretty transparent proverb, if not one much heard. It first appears in print in James Mabbe’s translation of the endless 15th-century play Celestina, or as he titled it The Spanish Bawd (1631).
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