One for Sorrow (8 page)

Sneeze on Monday, sneeze for fun, 
Sneeze on Tuesday, meet someone 
Sneeze on Wednesday, get a letter 
Sneeze on Thursday, get something

better 

Sneeze on Friday, sneeze in sorrow
Sneeze on Saturday, see friends

tomorrow 

Sneeze on Sunday, bad luck for a

week.

Sneezing has always been the subject of superstition. The tradition of saying ‘bless you' when someone sneezes came about because it used to be believed that a sneeze caused your soul to leave your body for a moment, which could leave it vulnerable to being snatched away by the devil if someone nearby didn't counteract his diabolical powers with a blessing. In Catholic tradition the sneeze was thought to be an evil spirit being expelled from someone's body and the sneezer needed blessing for their bravery in defeating it, while Irish folklore has it that the your disembodied soul might be snatched by the pixie-like Little People if someone didn't bless you.
    This rhyme illustrates the way sneezes were also used to predict future events, which was a popular notion in the days when planning ahead couldn't be facilitated by telephone or email. Sneezes from Monday to Saturday were all auspicious and promised something of interest in the week ahead. But by far the most common superstitions were linked in some way to bad luck, either how to predict it or how to fend it off, and sneezing on the Lord's day wasn't good news. These days we don't make much of the day of the week on which we sneeze, but we do still say ‘bless you'.

   

This saying is often preceded by another rhyming couplet:
‘
Birds fly high, clear blue sky', and was used as a way of predicting the onset of wet weather by farmers who depended on rain at the right times of year to hydrate their crops and yield them a good harvest.
    Birds were respected for their close attunement with the climate and their behaviour was closely observed for hints of what kind of weather lay ahead. Much of their flying behaviour is determined by air pressure, and weather lore that is based on changes in air pressure has scientific reasons behind it and is genuinely useful in making short-term weather forecasts.
    Birds really do fly lower in the sky before rain because wet weather is associated with low pressure, which makes the air thinner and more difficult for birds to fly in. The flight patterns of insects are affected in the same way and it may be that birds are brought closer yet to the ground by the descent of their prey.
    Another piece of folklore says if rooks' nests are built high in the treetops it will be a fine summer; while if they're closer to the ground the summer will be wet and cold, though this is more likely to be to do with the amount of wind at the time of nest-building than the tell-tale drop in pressure that signals storms.

This phrase has been in use since at least the mid-sixteenth century and for many medieval farmers and smallholders it would have had literal as well as metaphorical relevance. The sale of livestock was an important source of income and it must have been tempting to calculate what your budget might be for the following month based on the number of eggs you hoped would have hatched by market day. But eggs are the perfect ingredient for this kind of allegory because for them to hatch successfully conditions have to be exactly right; the rooster needs to be young and virile; the hens have to sit on the eggs so that the temperature stays high enough for the chicks to develop, and the humidity levels have to be higher than average. With all these factors at play it isn't unusual for a number of eggs not to hatch, and in the days before incubators, unhatched eggs were even more common.
    The wise words first appeared in print in the poet Thomas Howell's
New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets
(1570), which adds an additional line to emphasize this lesson:

Counte not thy Chickens that

vnhatched be,

Waye wordes as winde, till thou finde

certaintee.

These days we abbreviate the phrase to ‘Don't count your chickens' and still use it for advocating caution when assessing one's assets. We also use it to explain our own reluctance to assume success before we're sure of it by saying ‘I don't want to count my chickens'. More recent US folklore offers the alternative ‘Don't go selling the hide while the bear remains in the hole.'

Superstitions about leap years abound and understanding the power of proverbs like this one requires an insight into how we came to have an extra day added to our calendar in the first place. The first leap year occurred in 46
bc
with the creation of the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar who reformed the Roman calendar to tally with the natural cycle of the seasons, which had been observed since ancient times to be roughly 365¼ days long. He divided the year into twelve months, with an extra day added to February every fourth year, but a miscalculation meant that leap days were in fact added every third year and the calendar gradually moved out of sync with the astronomical solstices and equinoxes.
    In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII established the widespread use of the Gregorian calendar, which kept the addition of a leap day to every fourth year. Despite the fact that the extra day was intended to align the calendar more closely to the rhythms of the planet, many rural people felt that it was tinkering with nature.
    Their suspicion of the changes was exacerbated by the removal of ten days from the month of October in the year the Gregorian calendar was introduced. The measure was deeply unpopular with the people, some of whom believed it would cost them ten days of their lives, and there were widespread protests against the changes. They believed that it could throw the cycles of crop growing and livestock rearing out of kilter, thus reducing the number of lambs born each spring.

   

This warning against dividing your efforts between two tasks rather than focusing on one was among those collected by Erasmus in his
Adagia
of 1500. The Latin version goes:
‘Duos insequens lepores, neutrum capit'
, which translates as ‘He who chases two hares catches neither.'
    Hares were eaten regularly by the Greeks and Romans and were an important part of the medieval diet. Hare coursing, where hares are hunted with packs of dogs, is one of the oldest field sports in Europe so the phrase resonated with the aristocracy as well as with the peasantry, though the latter were severely punished if they were caught killing or eating a hare that belonged to the Lord of the Manor.
    The first example of the phrase in print appeared in 1509 in an English translation of German humanist Sebastian Brant's satire of fifteenth-century folly the
Narrenschiff – Ship of Fools
(originally published in 1494), which says: ‘A fole is he . . . Whiche with one haunde tendyth [intends] to take two harys in one instant.'
    The book was one of the most successful publications of its age and is likely to have been responsible for the continued popularity of the phrase. The proverb would also have appealed to the medieval belief in hares as representatives of cunning and artifice. Countless folktales tell of duplicitous hares who lead men astray and later reveal themselves to be witches in disguise, cementing the notion that to catch one requires one's full and undivided attention.

   

With the vast majority of the population depending on the product of their own kitchen gardens for food, it was seen as a selfless act of kindness towards future generations to devote time and space to planting a tree that wouldn't yield fruit in your own lifetime.
    A Latin version of the phrase, which appeared in Cicero's discourse on old age
Cato Major
, is proof of an enduring belief in the sentiment:

Serit arbores, quae alteri saeclo prosint.

(
‘He plants trees, which will be of use to another age.'
)

The version in Fuller's
Gnomologia
(1732) is rather heartwarming: ‘He that plants Trees loves others besides himself.' Fuller also included in that collection the similar ‘He who plants a Walnut-Tree, expects not to eat of the Fruit.'
    The form we're more used to is employed by Scottish poet and essayist Alexander Smith in his countryside-praising prose work
Dreamthorpe
published in 1863: ‘My oaks are but saplings; but what undreamed-of English kings will they not outlive? A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.'
    Modern readers may be more familiar with a later version of the phrase from the seventeenth century: ‘Walnuts and pears you plant for your heirs', which refers to the particularly slow-growing walnut and pear trees which can take more than a decade to reach maturity.
    The phrase was used metaphorically whenever people wanted to convey the point that they were working towards a long-term goal and these days may be heard simply as a sigh of ‘walnuts and pears' when parents talk about the lengths they will go to for their children's future.

The idea that in order to defend yourself successfully against attack you must be prepared to use the same methods and weapons, or go to the same extremes as your enemy, has probably existed since organized fighting began. The phrase ‘to fight fire with fire' could be a reference to firearms, even very early ones, but could equally be a reference to fire itself. An early fourteenth-century French phrase states ‘
lung feu doit estaindre lautre
' – ‘one fire must put out another'.
    There is no record as to when it was found that one fire can stop another by consuming the oxygen and other fuel – given the right conditions – but Shakespeare was pleased with the metaphoric possibilities, which he used several times. In  
Romeo and Juliet
(1592), Benvolio urges Romeo to go to a ball where he can meet other nice girls and get over Rosaline, his first love: ‘Tut, man, one fire burns out another's burning.'

And in
King John
(1595), Shakespeare wrote:

Be stirring as the time;
be fire with fire;
Threaten the threatener
and outface the brow
Of bragging horror . . .

Again, in 1608, in
Coriolanus
: ‘One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail.'
    Other versions of the phrase were recorded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it is Shakespeare who popularized the saying.
    In the 1800s, the phrase was used in its literal sense by the early American settlers, who turned to the technique now common in managing bush fires of lighting a small backfire when forest fires threatened to destroy their settlements. This helped consolidate the use of the phrase in the US, as evidenced by American author Henry Tappan in his 1852 memoir
A Step from the New World to the Old, and Back Again:

Smoking was universal among the men; generally cigars, not fine Havanas, but made of Dutch tobacco, and to me not very agreeable. I had some Havanas with me, and so I lighted one to make an atmosphere for myself: as the trappers on the prairies fight fire with fire, so I fought tobacco with tobacco.

The phrase is still in regular use on both sides of the Atlantic, though these days we often use it to validate the use of violence in cases of self-defence or to justify sinking to the levels of our rivals in dirty sports matches or office spats.