Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The folk wisdom that’s just wrong

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issue 07 October 2023

I was only a boy when I first began protesting against the idiocy of so much of the folk wisdom handed down to us. Proverbs, adages and aphorisms (‘a pithy observation that contains a general truth,’ says my dictionary) are recited to children by grown-ups, often in a singsong, holier-than-thou voice; and I couldn’t help noticing that many were quite evidently untrue, contained thoroughly bad advice, and some nuggets of supposedly sage proverbial wisdom are flatly contradicted by other nuggets of sage proverbial wisdom. I started taking a note whenever my attention was caught by yet another glaringly obvious example of a proverb, sanctimonious or trite, that was just plain wrong.

If we all seized the moment every time some hare-brained move occurred to us, we’d be in deep trouble

Last week I heard a politician, taken to task for the pettifogging nature of some initiative or other they were trying to trumpet (probably involving potholes), retort: ‘Yes, but every little helps.’

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