One for Sorrow (6 page)

In the most straightforward of terms, carrying all your eggs in one basket is clearly a risky strategy. One trip on an uneven country road could cause that basket to slip from your arm and all your eggs would be cracked. The Italians seem to have been the first to see the sense in splitting a valuable load to avoid such a catastrophe and some sources cite a 1662 translation of an Italian phrase ‘To put all ones Eggs in a Paniard' as the origin of our own version. It means don't invest all your money, time or efforts in just one enterprise in case it fails and leaves you with nothing. It's safer, the phrase suggests, to divide your resources so that if one metaphorical basket overturns, you've got several others that are still secure.
    In Samuel Palmer's book of proverbs (
Moral essays on some of the most curious . . . English, Scotch, and foreign proverbs
, published in 1710), the phrase appears as ‘Don't venture all your eggs in one basket.' Which elucidates its meaning more fully than the more modern wording if we take ‘venture' to mean ‘risk' or ‘gamble'.
    Today the phrase is synonymous with ‘hedging your bets', a saying also coined in the late seventeenth century. It refers to the practice of placing several small bets with a range of lenders in order to offset a larger bet – putting figurative hedges round them to protect and limit them – and basically means keeping your options open.

Though it may sound like a straightforward piece of advice for gardeners who like to feel the grass between their toes, this phrase has been recognized as a proverb since the late sixteenth century. In 1611 it appeared in print for the first time in
A dictionarie of the French and English tongues
, compiled by the lexicographer Randle Cotgrave. Alongside his translations, he included a number of proverbs, many of which existed in both languages to show how the word might be put to use. Under  
pied
, he put :

He that will bare-foot goe must plant no thornes.

Fuller keeps it brief in
Gnomologia
(1732):

‘Barefoot must not go among Thorns.'

Thorns were as much of an irritation to the peasants of old as they are to today's gardeners but the consequences of getting a thorn embedded in the skin were far graver in the days before tetanus jabs, chemical disinfectants and antibiotics.
    The phrase does seem to be rooted in the fairly obvious dangers of stepping on a thorn but was used figuratively as a way of expressing the view that people shouldn't create situations that they're not equipped to deal with. Feel free to plant thorns if you've got a sensible pair of thick-soled boots, a modern version of the phrase might go, but stick to artificially cultivated thornless roses if you prefer to float around with your shoes and socks off. The phrase is similar in essence to another old proverb: those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
    First recorded in John Clarke's
Parœmiologia Anglo-Latina
, published in 1639 is a Latin proverb which reads ‘Where ever a man dwell he shall be sure to have a thorne-bush near his doore' – an indication that few stations in life were likely to be entirely free from trouble. When he included it in his
Collection of Proverbs
in 1678, the naturalist John Ray added as a practical aside the more literal difficulty of avoiding thorn bushes by explaining that there ‘are few places in England where a man can dwell, but he shall have one near him.'

   

This phrase warning against inquisitiveness is relatively modern in this form, only finding its way into print just before the end of the nineteenth century. The proverb it originates from, however, has a much longer history. ‘Care killed the cat', where ‘care' meant anxiety or grief, was already in regular use by the time the English playwright Ben Jonson used it in his comedy
Every Man in his Humour
in 1598:

Helter skelter, hang sorrow, care'll kill a Cat, up-tails all, and a Louse for the Hangman.

Medieval medicine was based on the belief that the body contained four humours – black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood, which must be correctly balanced for good health to be maintained. Melancholia (characterized by sadness and anxiety – or ‘care') was thought to be the result of too much black bile, which was damaging to the health.
    The earliest printed evidence of the change from ‘care' to ‘curiosity' is thought to be in the Gaveston
Daily News
of 1898: ‘It is said that once “curiosity killed a Thomas cat.”'
    Cats have a strong presence in British folklore; they were thought to bring bad luck through their association with witches and the myth that they have nine lives may have given rise to ideas about what kinds of behaviour might actually kill them. With the template of the earlier phrase already in place, cats' tendency to explore every nook and cranny, including narrow spaces and perilously high ones, made them useful in a metaphor for the dangers of concerning yourself with other people's business.

   

Since the late eighteenth century this phrase has been used to refer to the presence in every family or community of one disreputable character or misfit. The wool trade had been a lynchpin of the British economy since medieval times when every landowner, even the relatively poor owners of tiny smallholdings, would have raised as many sheep as their acreage allowed.
    Black sheep are rarer than white (just common enough for most flocks to include at least one) and can be born unexpectedly into a white flock since the gene that determines the black colour is recessive. Their rarity didn't make them valuable to sheep farmers though because their wool can't be dyed so they were usually unwelcome arrivals. They were also regarded by many as a sign of more widespread bad luck (black-woolled twin lambs was especially bad news) as in English folklore the colour black is associated with the devil. Christian demonologists believed that demons often took the form of animals whose skin or fur was black, hence the widespread distrust of black cats (confusingly, also seen as bringing good luck), as well as the view that a black sheep was in some way a bad one.
    These superstitions combined with another widespread eighteenth-century view – that conformity was fundamentally a good thing – to cement this phrase as an often repeated homily whenever a rouge relation threatened to bring shame or embarrassment on the family
.

   

This traditional rhyme dates back to 1744 when it was published in an anthology of nursery rhymes. Numerous versions exist, the most well-known in the UK being:

Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,

Your house is on fire and your children

are gone,

All except one,

And her name is Ann,

And she hid under the frying pan.

In America the verse is rather more bleak:

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,

Your house is on fire,

Your children shall burn!

Legend has it that during a plague of plant-destroying insects in the Middle Ages, desperate farmers prayed to the Virgin Mary for help and their prayers were answered by a swarm of ladybirds who preserved the crops by eating all the invaders. In recognition of this they became known as ‘lady beetles', and later ‘ladybirds'. Or, in the US, ‘ladybugs', and it was seen as bad luck to kill one.
    Some sources suggest the rhyme was taught to children to encourage them to treat ladybirds gently as they were also helpful to farmers because of their diet of more destructive insects. Others say it was recited by the farmers themselves as they attempted to shoo the useful creatures off their land before they began the routine practice of preparing their fields for the following year's crops by setting them alight, or tried to rid their crops of other insects by smoking them out. These days we say the rhyme and make a wish as we blow a ladybird off our clothing.

   

This proverb was first recorded in 1678 in John Ray's
Collection of Proverbs
as:

As good be hang'd for an old sheep as a young lamb.

But it is likely to have been in use since at least the start of the seventeenth century as the belief it expounds was described in a 1662 commentary on the Biblical parable of the Rich Fool by clergyman Nehemiah Rogers, who wrote: ‘As some desperate Wretches, Who despairing of life still act the more villainy, giving this desperate Reason of it, As good be hanged for a great deal, as for a little.'
    The saying itself is a reference to the harsh British penal system which attached the death penalty (or at the very least, deportation to Australia) to a list of crimes which today we might consider minor. The theft of goods worth more than one shilling carried a death sentence, as did stealing sheep, regardless of the size or age of the animal. The phrase makes a mockery of the efficacy of such draconian penalties by pointing out that rather than deterring those desperate enough to risk death in order to steal a lamb, they simply encouraged hungry thieves to set their sights on the largest sheep they could find.
    By the time the law was finally reformed in the 1820s the phrase was well established as a proverb and is still used to suggest that if the consequences of your actions will be the same no matter what kind of risk you take, you may as well make it a big one.

Mares' tails and mackerel scales
Make lofty ships carry low sails.

The system of Latin cloud names weather forecasters use today was created by English pharmacist Luke Howard in 1803, before then (and since in many parts of the world) amateur observers of the weather used traditional names derived from the way the clouds looked. Mares' tails are what we now know as cirrus clouds, and were given their name because they often resemble the flowing tail of a horse as it runs. They're the most common form of high-level cloud and because they are usually found at heights above 20,000 feet, where air pressure is low, they are usually very thin and wispy – the Latin word  
cirrus
means ‘curl'. Mares' tales are made up of ice crystals that form when the water droplets in them freeze; they usually occur in fair weather, but can precede a storm, especially when seen, as the rhyme suggests, alongside ‘mackerel scales'.
    Mackerel scales are altocumulus clouds, which are small, rounded white puffs that join together to form a rippling blanket of puffs, or ‘scales' in the sky. Their appearance is caused by the influence of shifting wind directions typical of an advancing low-pressure system that usually brings stormy weather.
    These cloud formations were particularly useful to sailors of large vessels who would have had to lower their sails in preparation for gusty weather.