Good things come in small packages…
but then again,
The bigger, the better.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained…
but then again,
Better safe than sorry.
Two’s company, three’s a crowd…
but then again,
The more, the merrier.
Half a loaf is better than none…
but then again,
Do it well or not at all.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder…
but then again,
Out of sight, out of mind.
A penny saved is a penny earned…
but then again,
Money is the root of all evil.
Many hands make light work…
but then again,
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Opposites attract…
but then again,
Birds of a feather flock together.
Don’t judge a book by its cover…
but then again,
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
The pen is mightier than the sword…
but then again,
Actions speak louder than words.
It’s never too late to learn…
but then again,
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
He who hesitates is lost…
but then again,
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Practice makes perfect…
but then again,
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
We are tempted to add to this list one bilingual example — namely,
Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse… but then again, A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Oddly enough, even if dictionaries compiled in Britain tend to agree with the French-language interpretation of this international proverb (namely, that by constantly moving about one never acquires any deep roots or anything of value), we have informally observed that most Americans hear this proverb in the opposite fashion. That is, they consider the gathering of moss to be an obviously bad thing to happen to a person (or a stone), and so from their point of view, the proverb exhorts people to stay constantly on the move in order to avoid acquiring a nasty crust. The irony is that although the English and French proverbs say the same thing on a word-by-word level, their interpretations are often quite opposite, and for Americans the meaning tends to be roughly, “Keep on rolling so you won’t stagnate.” Pascal might have said, “A truth becomes a falsity once it crosses the Atlantic.”
But back to the main list… The fact that each line features a pair of proverbs that assert contradictory things shows that what counts is not a proverb’s truth, but its ability to cast light on a situation, allowing it to be seen as more than simply a recitation of events. Don’t judge a book by its cover and Where there’s smoke, there’s fire are categories that help one to highlight, on the one hand, the importance of not being distracted by cheap attention-getting tricks and of looking below the surface of things, and on the other hand, the importance of not ignoring what’s right in front of one’s eyes and of paying attention to salient clues. These two opposite stances, embodied in short and familiar phrases, can, if they form part of one’s lexicon, be used to pin pithy labels on, and thus concisely categorize, novel situations that are very complex, thereby implicitly conveying entire attitudes about them.
The categories denoted by proverbs are not statements any more than other categories are statements. Thus the category Don’t judge a book by its cover is not, despite its surface appearance, a statement (indeed, one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover!) — no more than the category table or bird is a statement. It is a point of view that can be adopted on various situations. Just as the category bird is a platform for making inferences (if something is a bird, probably it flies, sings, has feathers, lives in a nest…) rather than a statement, so saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a sign of recognition that one is in a situation where prudence is called for in judgment, and where one should make sure to look well below the surface and to use one’s critical faculties. And it’s important to remember that this categorization of a situation, just like others, can be an inappropriate one. Just as one can assume that a small glass container filled with fine white grains contains salt rather than sugar, soon discovering one’s mistake, so one can sometimes categorize a situation as belonging to the category Don’t judge a book by its cover, only to realize later that this was an ill-advised judgment. In some cases, books are in fact perfectly represented and appropriately judged by their covers, and in some life situations, making a snap judgment based solely on surface-level cues can in fact be crucial. A person who intones “Don’t judge a book by its cover” has not necessarily put their finger on the crux of the situation that they have so labeled. It may well be a Where there’s smoke, there’s fire situation instead.
A Stolen Cell Phone can “Be” a Dog Bite
Obviously, “Once bitten, twice shy” goes way beyond the idea that someone who has suffered a dog (or snake) bite will henceforth steer clear of all dogs (or snakes) at all times. Although the proverb is ostensibly about animal-bite victims, it is really about any number of other situations whose details are completely unforeseeable. What counts is that those other situations should share a conceptual skeleton with the microevent conjured up by the four words in the proverb. Thus, we could easily see any of the following situations as meriting the label:
After marrying, A. had two children, and then her marriage started falling apart. She found out that her husband had been cheating on her and lying to her for years. It ended up in a very painful divorce. Ever since then, A. has been suspicious of all men, no matter how gentle and kind they are.
B. and C. are from China and live in San Francisco. One day, their son was the victim of racial taunts from a classmate in his public school. The next day, his parents pulled him out of that school and enrolled him in a very expensive private school.
While walking down a steep staircase, D. slipped and fell down several stairs. Although his fall had no serious effects, when he got back to his feet, he was trembling, because he knew he could easily have broken several bones. For the next two days, everywhere he walked, D. took exceeding care. While going up and down his stairs at home he went at a snail’s pace, and the mere idea of riding his bicycle struck him as the height of insanity.
After her apartment was burglarized, E., who till then had paid no attention to safety matters, all at once bought a fancy burglar alarm as well as the most expensive safety locks, and she promptly installed the locks on all her doors and windows, including her basement windows, which were so small that for anyone to break in through them would have been well-nigh inconceivable.
F.’s cell phone was stolen in broad daylight by a mugger in the middle of the street in a somewhat dangerous part of town. Ever since then, whenever he uses his cell phone, F. is constantly on the highest level of alert, looking all around himself with great nervousness, even when he is in swanky hotels or ritzy restaurants.
As this shows, “Once bitten, twice shy” conveys the idea that when some event leads to negative consequences, some people develop a hypersensitive avoidance strategy, even at the price of missing out on potentially excellent opportunities, in order not to re-encounter any situation that is even vaguely reminiscent of the triggering one, no matter how little risk it would seem to pose objectively. More succinctly, in the wake of a painful event, people tend to be skittish about events that remind them, however superficially, of the original event.
This idea, having to do with the aftermath of a traumatic event, is not self-evident. The idea that an emotional shock can have lasting negative consequences — that there can be “wounds to the soul” — became acceptable only in the last hundred and some years as a psychological notion. Trauma, originally thought of solely as physical damage to a living being, was ext
ended to the realm of psychic damage when it became part of the received wisdom that deep emotional shock can cause long-lasting repercussions, which suck the victim into a vortex of changes at many levels, sometimes reversible, sometimes not.
The Irrepressibility of Analogical Associations
Several languages, including Turkish, Italian, Spanish, German, and French, have proverbs about the irrepressibility of seeing certain analogies. Thus in French one says, “Il ne faut pas parler de corde dans la maison d’un pendu”, and it has a very rare English counterpart, “One mustn’t speak of rope in a hanged man’s house”, and, even more obscure, “One mustn’t say ‘Hang up your fish’ in a hanged man’s house”. The idea expressed by such proverbs is of course that people cannot help making analogical associations at the drop of a hat, and that everyone should be sensitive to this fact. Thus, even if one innocently wishes to allude to a piece of rope that was used to tie a package, or to say that some fish should be hung out to dry, it would be boorish to do so in the presence of the family of someone who had been hanged. The hanging would be vividly present in the uttered words, no matter how the thought was phrased. And so in certain circumstances, certain things cannot be said or even hinted at.
This proverb tips its hat to the fluidity of human cognition, but of course it doesn’t tell the whole story. Indeed, the spontaneous retrieval of proverbs, triggered by situations one encounters (as described in the book Dynamic Memory by cognitive scientist Roger Schank), shows that our everyday perception goes far beyond just seeing the hanging of a loved one in a mention of rope. When a proverb comes to mind in but a fraction of a second, a link has been discovered between two situations that would seem, on first glance, to have nothing whatsoever in common. For example, in the story where Jim, as he widely skirts Lucy’s rebuilt wooden-block fence, suddenly blurts out, “Once bitten, twice shy”, the connections exist only at a deeply semantic level. There was no dog, no bite, and no physical pain; instead there was an accidental kick, a falling block, and some psychic pain witnessed (in other words, not Jim’s own psychic pain, but vicariously-experienced anguish). Rather than fearing a deliberate external attack bringing about his own physical pain, Jim was concerned about accidentally causing someone else mental anguish. And yet the analogy seemed obvious, even trivial, to him — a throwaway remark, a mere bagatelle, nothing to write home about — hardly a mental feat to be proud of. And for all the other Once bitten, twice shy situations given in our list above, one could make similar comments. There is no dog, but there is an “abstract dog”; there is no bite, but an “abstract bite”; there is often no physical pain, but just something that maps onto it. At the core of each event, however, there is a person who overreacts, sometimes wildly so, to an unpleasant situation. That is the crucial shared core.
The worldwide category Once bitten, twice shy pops up in many different verbal incarnations in various cultures around the globe, all of them superficially different, but tied to one another by their shared conceptual skeleton. It is interesting to notice how simple and down-to-earth each culture’s quintessential situation is, a fact that makes the proverb’s message seem very plausible, no matter what language it is in. Thus, for instance, in Romania people say, “Someone who gets burned while eating will blow even on yogurt.” In Afghanistan, “Someone bitten by a snake fears even a rope.” In China, “Bitten by a snake, frightened of tiny lizards.” And of course in English-speaking countries, “Once bitten, twice shy.” And thus this same category, whatever its surface-level linguistic guise may be, has a good chance of being evoked whenever (1) an event gave rise to negative consequences, and (2) a superficially similar event was subsequently avoided, no matter how unlikely it was to have negative consequences.
In France, the image is of boiling water scalding a cat, followed by the cat’s shunning of all water, even cold. The fact that cold water cannot scald shows that the desire to avoid it is irrational, and thus that the caution is overdone. Likewise, while a snakebite is painful and harmful, neither a rope (superficially resembling a snake) nor a tiny lizard (a distant biological cousin) presents the slightest risk of harm.
Novel “proverbs” along the same lines can be created at will, which serve to label exactly the same category, or very close categories. The reader may find it amusing to play this game, giving birth to alternative versions of “Once bitten, twice shy”. Here are a few sample pseudo-proverbs, just to set the ball rolling:
Mugging victims flinch at their own shadows.
Once fearless on ice, now fearful on driest dirt.
Broke a bicuspid on a bone, balks at biting butter.
Assaulted by one’s enemy, afraid of one’s best friend.
Struck once by a stone, the cur now cringes at cotton.
Robbed in the red-light district, terrified in a teahouse.
A woman betrayed shuns even the most virtuous of men.
Caught cold one winter; now dons sweaters each summer.
One who’s been through bankruptcy spurns the surest of deals.
Little fingers smashed in doors will ever steer clear of doorknobs.
All the pithy phrases we’ve considered, whether taken from real cultures or invented by us, bring to mind and apply to situations centered on a traumatic event. In contrast to so many idioms that are impenetrable on the basis of just their component words, such as “to see red”, “to sing the blues”, “to be yellow”, “to be in the pink”, “to be in the black”, “to spill the beans”, “to shoot one’s wad”, “to fly off the handle”, “to go on a wild goose chase”, “to go Dutch”, “to be in Dutch”, “to say uncle”, or “to be a Dutch uncle”, a proverb has the twofold virtue of naming a category transparently and doing so in a catchy fashion. Indeed, unlike the preceding idioms, which, even if an etymologist could explain their origins, will still strike foreigners as being just as opaque and arbitrary as compound words such as “cocktail”, “understand”, and “handsome”, proverbs readily conjure up easily visualizable scenarios — “All that glitters is not gold”, “A leopard cannot change its spots”, “A rolling stone gathers no moss” — and this tightens and strengthens the link between the category and its linguistic label.
The Proper Scope of a Proverb
How broadly does a proverb apply? How wide is the scope of situations that a given proverb can be said to cover, without one feeling that one is stretching things uncomfortably? As we have seen in the foregoing, the mental categories associated with proverbs have members that on the surface are extremely different. This means that such categories are very broad, and that they bring together situations whose common gist is located only at a high level of abstraction.
The French proverb “Qui vole un œuf vole un bœuf” has a relatively little-known counterpart in English: “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox.” There is also a proverb in Arabic that says “He who will steal an egg will steal a camel.” Someone might argue that these two proverbs express very different ideas, a camel and an ox being rather different beasts. Of course this takes things at a ridiculously literal level. In hearing either proverb, we are meant to understand something far more general than the notion that a male human being who has stolen an egg will one day also steal either an ox or a camel. We are supposed to infer, through our natural tendency to generalize outwards, that any person, male or female, who steals something smallish stands a good chance of going on and committing more serious acts of thievery later on. A schoolchild who swipes a candy bar may well steal Picassos as a grownup, or perhaps “Paper-clip filcher at five, hardened bank robber at twenty-five.” But the intended lesson hidden behind the proverb’s surface is probably considerably broader than that, since thievery is not really the point here — the targeted idea is bad deeds of any sort, including cheating on tests, engaging in fights, and so forth. The crux of the proverb is that bad deeds on a small scale can be but the initial step on a slippery slope leading towards subsequent bad deeds that resemble them but on a much larger sc
ale.
Aside from the idea of scaling up the initial bad deed, it is also possible that as the bad deed grows in size over time, it also changes in nature, moving from an insult to an assault, from an assault to an assassination. The kid who steals a pencil from another kid’s locker in school and then as an adult becomes a hired killer would thus be covered by “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox.”
But we are not done yet, for who says that our proverb covers only crimes? Why not let the category flex a bit more, allowing it to cover all kinds of negative behavior, criminal or not? For example, being fresh to one’s parents as a kid could lead to habitual aggressive language when one is grown up, or telling little white lies as a kid could lead to telling whoppers to one’s spouse, or saying “Darn!” as a kid could be a prelude to swearing like a sailor when one is big. All of these cases would then be covered by “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox.” Or would they? Where are the implicit, unspelled-out boundaries of this proverb’s category?
Suppose we allow the scope to become more encompassing yet. We could, for instance, drop the idea that the behavior in question has to be negative. In that case, the proverb’s meaning becomes roughly, “Small acts are a prelude to larger acts.” This might mean, for instance, that a child who drops a penny in a beggar’s cap stands a good chance of going on to head up a charitable organization when grown up, or that someone who starts a musical instrument when young will turn into a concert artist.
On the other hand, we suspect that most people would say that we’ve gone way overboard here — that expanding the scope of the proverb so that it applies to positive as well as negative actions, and not even caring about any similarity existing between the earlier and later acts that it is centered on, is not faithful to what it genuinely means. It’s like taking the word “chair” to stand not only for all the standard chairs that people have deliberately designed over the millennia, but also for countless other physical objects, since a person can sit on just about anything. At that point, the word “chair” has lost most of its useful meaning. All this suggests that there is an optimal level of generalization of the proverb that does not dilute its meaning to the point of absurdity.
Surfaces and Essences Page 19