“Ten poems in one night? Wow! How can you do it?”
“I’m fast at poems. There’s nothing to it.”
“But haven’t you had this assignment a while?”
“But I’ve got the whole night to finish the pile.”

“It’s quite a long haul. You’ll pull an all-nighter.”
“Yes, true, I might, but I’m a tough fighter.”
“Won’t your quality tend to suffer?”
“They’re not too bad, and I’ve written rougher.”

“Well, after tonight, your poems will be done.
You’ll catch up on sleep, go out, and have fun.
But your teacher will suffer when you’ve gained your freedom.
You had to write ‘em, but HE has to read ‘em!”

Saying: Never judge a book by its cover.

My Answer: Never judge judging a book by its cover by its cover.

Both literally and metaphorically, there are just too many books out there. You can’t read them all, and you probably can’t even read reviews for them all. For most, you won’t even pull the book off the shelf so you can see the whole cover. Judging books by their covers is an imperfect system. You end up missing a lot of really good books, and you may end up reading some that are a waste of your time.

Sometimes, you’ll get a good recommendation, or hear a book review on the radio – but this is really just another kind of “cover” – information that may or may not serve you well in knowing the nature of the whole book – and, the more in-depth you go in your selection, the fewer books you’ll be able to know anything about at all.

In short, you have to judge books by their covers, in one way or another. With time and practice, you can develop an eye for the kinds of books you might like – but it will never be perfect. It helps to know you’re making assumptions – that every book you pass over may be the read of a lifetime, and you may never know. But, not knowing, you’ll still be able to enjoy the best of the books you do read.

And Jesus, surfing on a site in Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting their words upon the net: for they were bloggers. And he tweeteth unto them, Follow Me, that ye may ever know my status. – Matthew 4:18-19 (paraphrased)

Some of you may have seen that before, but I couldn’t resist using it again. I’m putting out my call, too. “Follow Me, for when I tweet, thou shalt know when Steve should be read.” I won’t be telling anybody what I’m having for breakfast, or when I’m going out clubbing. This will be reserved for ReadSteve type news. What kind of news is that? You can’t know what you don’t follow!

http://twitter.com/ReadSteve will get you there, or you can just search for ReadSteve (no spaces) on Twitter. I’m pretty easy to find.

Saying: If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

My answer: Speak for yourself!

I believe in my ability to have an open, yet critical mind. I think that too many of the world’s evils come from people taking rigid, inflexible stands for which they have no logical support. I’m sure I have some unsupported beliefs. Maybe we can’t even function without them – but I think it makes sense to at least recognize our unsupported beliefs, and realize they could be wrong.

I resent the implication that openness to change of opinion through learning makes me a gullible fool. Users of this Saying, if you need to stand up for something through thick and thin in order to function in this world, then, by all means, do it. Recognizing your limitations, and working with them, is important. But don’t go telling me that I need the same thing. I don’t think I do – and there are all kinds of things I don’t fall for. That’s why I say, “Speak for yourself!”

I do think that, to make sense of the world, you need a way of filtering through all that the world throws at you, and finding truth in the whirlwind of irrelevant and misleading information that surrounds us continuously. But to refer to that method as “standing for something” seems to me very narrow indeed.  There are other ways to filter.

Finally, this saying qualifies for my Truth Through Wordplay Alert. In this instance, the content of the saying bugs me a lot more than the wordplay that “supports” it.

I enjoy wordplay. I pun more than most people would want me to, and I enjoy a good pun when I hear it. I don’t think puns are mindless like many people do. I think that puns are an outgrowth of our pattern matching skills, and that people who are good at puns are also good at recognizing more useful patterns, and maybe changing the world.

Wordplay is a poor substitute for wisdom and deep thought, however. When someone says “Forgiving is for giving away”, with a straight face, as if imparting the most profound wisdom, I want to throw up. I realize I may have some growing up to do. I know that wordplay can be a useful mnemonic device, a reminder of truth, just as rhyme can make a poem easier to memorize and more fun to hear.

I’m not against all sayings with wordplay. I had a German professor who used to say “Wirklichkeit ist das, was wirkt.” Roughly translated, it means “Reality is that which has an effect.” It’s a very useful saying when reading Kafka, where you never really know what’s in a character’s mind and what’s in the real world. In a sense, it doesn’t matter. What affects your world is real. It is debatable, and I have to say that I believe there’s a big difference between thinking you’re being stabbed in the heart and actually being stabbed in the heart. The former might kill you, and the latter will. But phantoms of the mind can ruin your life, and they can kill you. They may also improve your life and make you happy, too, but you’d never learn that by reading German literature.

Back to the topic, the original German has wordplay. The noun Wirklichkeit (reality) and the verb wirken (to have an effect) appear to have the same root. The sentence appears to be as obvious as “Snowmen are made of snow.” I want to say that the reason I like this particular saying is that it has substance on its own. It has meaning and truth even in English, where the wordplay is stripped away. But maybe I like it also because it’s in another language, and has to be explained to most people I know. I don’t like to think that, but maybe there’s some truth to it.¹

In any case, I’m not likely to change much on this. When someone tells me “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, and today is a gift – that’s why they call it the present,” I balk. No, that’s NOT why. Everybody knows that – even the pseudo-sages who peddle this crap. And here I face a real dilemma when I challenge my gut. I actually believe that the present moment is a valuable thing. I believe it’s when everything happens – it’s the one time you have any control over. But the wordplay takes something away from it for me. I also believe that forgiveness shouldn’t have to be earned, but I’m not sure that’s very profound.

So maybe I just need to get over myself, as far as my dislike of certain sayings goes. Some contain wordplay, and some don’t. Some rhyme and some don’t. Some make allusions to classic literature and some don’t. Shouldn’t I just take them all for whatever little nuggets of wisdom they offer, and not worry about the decorative bits that make them easy to remember?

Perhaps, but I still think my gut is telling me something. Wordplay should be used playfully. There’s nothing wrong with imparting wisdom playfully, but it’s also important not to give the playfulness any more weight than it deserves. So, when I see wordplay in a saying, I’ll be extra careful to evaluate it on its own merits, and not give it extra validity because it has extra cleverness in it. I’ll flag it with a Truth Through Wordplay Alert, and then move on to get what I can from it, independent of the wordplay.

_______________________

¹The same professor used to ask, “Ist es dicht?” (“Is it dense?”) when referring to poetry. He argued that poetry takes many forms, but the very definition of it is that poetry makes efficient use of words – the words are packed with more meaning than the average word. The German word for poetry is dichtung. As far as I know, there’s no etymological connection between dichtung and dicht, but my professor used to talk as if the relationship were a given. I also liked the insight that poetry is dense – another instance of wordplay imparting insight, which I like despite that.

Saying: Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

My Answer: I agree with the principle, and I agree that there’s too much sloppiness in the world.  On the other hand, I think that this principle stops me a little too often.  If I find time lacking, I often don’t start – and I don’t think that saying was ever intended as an excuse to procrastinate.

In particular, ReadSteve gets stalled too often because I want a complete and finished piece before I put anything out on the Web.  Of course, nothing should stop me from starting a piece when time is short, and then completing it later.  That doesn’t violate the principle of doing it well.  I’ll try to do that more.

But it doesn’t hurt to have more than one weapon in my arsenal.  Another option when time is short is to just do a short piece.  I don’t need to write a thousand words.  This isn’t an English paper, and maybe you don’t even want to read a thousand words.

So let this serve as the introduction to a series I’ve thought of doing for some time – my own takes on sayings.  Some of these will be famous quotes, but I won’t be above using just about anything that’s well known, from ancient times, or from yesterday morning.  I’m not even going to promise that every saying will be well known.  My series, my rules – and I reserve the right to break my own rules.

I know the concept isn’t original, but I hope that some of my thoughts will be.