Always Make Water When You Can

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Madison calling from Wilmington, North Carolina.

Hello, Madison. Welcome to the show.

Well, I was calling to ask you about something that my grandfather used to say, which is that he would tell us to take Churchill’s advice. And I wanted to see what I could learn about that phrase.

Take Churchill’s advice?

Oh, boy. Churchill had lots of advice. Some of it good, some of it rascally.

What was it?

So when he would tell us that, we knew that he was basically telling us to go try to use the bathroom while you have the chance. Churchill’s advice says go to the bathroom every chance that you get.

So, like, if you’re on a road trip and you’re stopping for gas and you’re like, well, I don’t really have to go right now, but, you know, I may as well take Churchill’s advice since we’re here or something like that, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why would Churchill say that?

I have no idea. Like you said, Churchill was known for saying a lot of wacky things. So I was just wondering, like, is that something like do other people say that? Is that something that, you know, where would he have gotten that from? Is that something his family or he made up? Because I’ve never heard anybody or run into anybody else who knows what that means.

First of all, Madison, I would say that’s excellent advice, wouldn’t you?

Yeah, you know, it does come in handy.

Right, carpe p.m. But it didn’t come from Churchill, as you might have suspected.

Okay.

There is a quotation floating around that a lot of people repeat that goes something like, never pass up the chance to sit down or go to the bathroom. And it often gets attributed to Churchill. But it’s sort of like one of those memes that go around the Internet. Like, you know, you see a picture of Abraham Lincoln, which says, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. You know, he’s the source of that quote.

Yeah, so that’s not advice from Churchill, but there is a bit more to that story, isn’t there, Grant?

Yeah, there really is. There was a contemporary of Churchill. One of the biggest scandals of the age in the late 1940s was when the King of England abdicated the throne to marry the American Wallace Simpson, who had been divorced twice. And Edward wrote a book that was first serialized in newspapers across the English-speaking world. And in that book and in those serialized articles in the newspapers, he uses an expression that’s very similar to that. He says, perhaps one of the only positive pieces of advice that I was ever given was that supplies by an old courtier who observed only two rules really count. Never miss an opportunity to relieve yourself, never miss a chance to sit down and rest your feet. And this was from his book called A King’s Story, 1951. And at that point, he was no longer king. His official title was the Duke of Windsor.

And there’s a British scholar called Nigel Rees, who for a very long time has been researching quotations. He has a fantastic newsletter called Quote Unquote and a great website by the same name. And he believes, Nigel Rees believes, that it may go back even further among the royals, the royal families. He thinks it may have been said by the very first Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, as always make water when you can. Because it’s attributed to that first Duke of Wellington, but I don’t have a date on that. But it is possible that instead of Churchill, it comes from other British august figures of note who have to make lots of public appearances. I mean, this makes sense to me.

Yeah. Yeah. You’re always being shuttled around from important event to important event. And people always wanted to catch your eye or catch your arm and, you know, talk to you. And they forget that you have very human needs that are private, that don’t involve other people.

Well, that makes sense. Madison, thank you so much for calling today. And it doesn’t matter that your grandpa didn’t get it quite right. It was still really good advice to pass along to you.

It is. And you know, he had a lot of good advice. Thank you for letting me ask about that. That was a lot of fun.

Yeah, it was. All right. Take care. Call us again sometime.

-huh. Bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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