Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

Adage: (n) a proverb or short statement expressing a general truth: e.g. the old adage is “out of sight, out of mind.“

Perhaps a better adage would be, “If you’re out of your mind, we’d like you to be out of sight.

Of course, that’s not really an adage, is it? Just a piece of wisdom.

When I think of adage, I always think of “the boy who cried wolf.”

I remember hearing the story as a young fellow and it put a chill down my spine. I’m not sure why–maybe because it combined a boy, a wolf, and due to the boy’s lies and deceit, he ends up being chomped by the creature.

But today I am wondering if the adage ever prevented me from deceiving. It certainly didn’t stop me from embellishing. And God knows, it did nothing to inhibit my spoofing.

I guess I just think that if an adage doesn’t scare some sense into you, it’s just a story that no one would make into a movie because … you couldn’t get the funding.

Don’t get me wrong–I like adages. I wish that parables and cautionary tales still had the impact they once did. Or maybe they never did, but we all needed some tiny piece of ourselves to pass along, so we told these little fables to create connection. I’m not sure.

But the essence of “the boy who cried wolf” was that if you continue to try to get attention by lying to people about the seriousness of your condition, when your peril does arrive, people will be less likely to believe you and come to your aid.

Obviously, this particular adage has not yet landed in the spectrum of the thinking of the average politician. Newscasters would never be able to put together thirty minutes of copy if they weren’t trying to alarm us into believing that the wolf is at the door.

And what preacher would be able to hold the attention of a congregation without the flames of some hellfire and the sniff of some brimstone?

But human beings are a pretty intelligent lot. We are more intrigued with taking things to the limit than we are with limiting how we take things. So I think we can continue to tell “adages,” but whether they will be applied into everyday life is rather doubtful.

It’s not that we insist on suffering the slings and arrows of our own stupidity, it’s just that often stupidity seems very intelligent to us, and we fail to notice that the slings and arrows … are already shot in our direction.