The Last Straw: Instead of making doomed resolutions, I went out last week and bought a couple of new reference books. The Oxford dictionaries of proverbs and euphemisms, respectively, are worth reading at any time. But in these first days of January, when we're under pressure to reform, they provide much-needed support for the status quo, writes Frank McNally
The big advantage of proverbs is that they always sound wise, even when flagrantly contradicting each other. Thus you can generally find one to suit your mood on a given day. If you feel like getting up early, for example, your decision will be supported by a piece of wisdom first recorded in 1636 as "the early bird catcheth the worme". If you prefer to lie in, however, you can reflect on a later amendment to the proverb: "The early bird may catch the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese." And hey presto, you're asleep again.
Where proverbs are of no use, euphemisms take up the slack. Their dictionary is a monument to the human genius for avoiding harsh truths, offering as it does a vast range of obfuscation on everything from obesity ("classic proportions") to mental imbalance ("the bats are in the belfry") to a sudden loss of energy ("critical power excursion"). In case you don't recognise it, that last one was what the nuclear industry used to say before "Chernobyl" gave us a shorter description of the concept involved.
Mostly, the substitute terms are designed to soften reality, although there are a few notable exceptions. Hands up how many parents among you have at some time suggested "changing the baby"? This would be a drastic step in any situation, never mind one where the child just smells a bit; and thankfully few of us ever carry out the threat, opting to change the baby's nappy instead. But why can't we say that in the first place?
Not surprisingly, the biggest categories in the euphemism dictionary are sex and death. Death is particularly well served, partly because it's one of the few areas where both religion and organised crime agree on the need for roundabout descriptions.
The police ("foul play") and the medical profession ("negative patient care outcome") do their bit too. But between them, Protestant graveyards and the Mafia could fill a book.
The dictionary gives an example from an epitaph in Bath: "The Bonds of Life being gradually dissolved, She Winged her Flight from this World in expectation of a better, the 15th of January 1810." The Mafia is not quite so poetic (if you were Winged on your Flight from them, they'd probably visit the hospital to finish you off). But, with minor amendments, "he sleeps with the fishes" would not be out of place on a headstone. In fact, rendered in a New York Italian accent, many Victorian epitaphs ("freed from earthly limits", "called to a higher service", and so on) sound a bit sinister.
Speaking of which, Italians escape the cultural bias reflected in the book. But historic enemies of England are well represented, with "Irish", "Dutch" and "Chinese" deployed as adjectives for a wide range of unpleasant things, while the French are predictably portrayed as sex-crazed perverts who shoot pheasants out of season ("French pigeon"). Curiously, the Germans merit only two entries, including "German Democratic Republic". This was of course the official name of East Germany and, as euphemisms go, it was a good one.
Getting back to proverbs, it's remarkable how many ancient sayings have aged well. An obvious exception is "all's fair in love and war", which has been overtaken by the Geneva Convention. But it's also striking how dangerously ambiguous some proverbs can be - for example: "Feed a cold and starve a fever." This has always been interpreted - by me, anyway, and as recently as yesterday - to mean that over-eating will cure a cold, such as the annoyingly persistent one I've had for weeks.
Imagine my shock to find, mid-pizza, that as early as 1852 a writer was complaining how the phrase had been misunderstood "so as to bring on the fever it was meant to prevent". And that in 2002, the New Scientist suggested a clarifying amendment, viz: "If you feed a cold, you will have to starve a fever." The theory being that food intake during a cold forces your body to use up vital energy on digestion instead of fighting bugs, thereby increasing the chances of the illness escalating.
Which just goes to prove another old proverb: that you should "believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see, if you don't want your Bonds to be gradually dissolved". So to sum up, I've changed my mind about New Year resolutions. I'm going on a diet.