The Future is Here Proverb

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, one of the great pleasures in doing what we do is hanging around with the American Dialect Society crowd.

I’m thinking specifically of the email list, ADSL, which is, you know, is kind of a chaotic form of discussion about language and trends in English and, you know, things we say, what we do.

Yeah.

That kind of stuff.

Very current.

One of the things that they’re talking about now, Garson O’Toole brought this up because there’s a section in the Yale Book of Quotations called this Modern Proverbs.

Not a stitch in time saves nine, not that sort of thing, but things like the one attributed to William Gibson.

The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

And so it’s these expressions that we have in the modern world that demonstrate how we look at the modern world, not how we look at, say, the historical world.

Like a stitch in time saves nine is archaic and weird and awkward.

Make hay while the sun shines.

I mean, how many people make hay anymore, right?

It still works.

We kind of understand it, but it’s not relevant to us.

But there’s a bunch of these here.

I love this one.

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

And by modern, we mean probably since 1900, definitely since World War II.

And somehow kind of rejecting that haughty demeanor of the past and really kind of just getting down to the nuts and bolts of the modern way of life.

We have a casualness about popular discourse now that we did not have 100 years ago.

It has something to do with that.

A few more.

Put your money where your mouth is is relatively new, probably from the 1910s.

Is it?

Yeah, that’s not a bad one, right?

And an incredible amount of use in that.

I think that’s even been a slogan for commercial products.

Here’s another one that I love.

Life is just one damn thing after another.

That is true.

So is history.

But that’s the thing about an aphorism like this or a modern proverb.

They have a basic truth, and then the longer you think about them,

The more true they seem.

Yeah.

And you start to peel back the layers and begin to guess at other possible meanings

That are related to the surface one, right?

That’s kind of what a proverb aphorism is about.

Anyway, I thought I’d share those if you’ve got some modern proverb

That you’d like to share with us,

Send them an email to words@waywordradio.org

Or leave them on our voicemail at 1-877-929-9673.