One for Sorrow (13 page)

Cooks were the head of the kitchen in the Middle Ages and were often great sources of folklore as they were respected in the community and had usually served long apprenticeships learning their skills. This proverb makes the point that incorporating the ideas of too many people, especially people who are used to being in charge of their own domain, tends not to have an end result that represents the sum of their skills but rather one that is much less successful than what they could have achieved on their own.
    The adage can be traced back to the late sixteenth century, when it was more often given as ‘the more cooks, the worse potage', potage being a kind of thick, stew-like soup made from oats that was common in medieval cooking.
    Broth or potage is excellent for making the point of the proverb because of the individual preferences of each cook for how much seasoning to add and which additional ingredients to use. Potage was usually made from whatever could be had from the kitchen garden: leeks, turnips or carrots made a simple background flavour, but herbs, spices and plenty of salt were added to make it taste good – ingredients that work well in the right quantities but which could make the dish completely unpalatable if the balance was wrong.
    Still popular today, the phrase is often abbreviated to ‘Too many cooks . . .' and used in work environments when too many people wanting to have their say on a particular project threatens the quality of what they produce. In 1979,
The
Guardian
commented:

It was a great mistake to think that
administration was improved by
taking on more administrators . . .
‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.'

This saying has been in use since the seventeenth century to spur people into taking control of a situation by evoking the image of a horse taking control back from his rider. The bit is the mouthpiece that allows the pressure being put on a horse's reins to be felt in the softest part of a horse's mouth, which means that it is forced to turn its head in the direction its rider wants to go. A horse taking the bit between its teeth, rather than allowing it to pull at the more sensitive skin, was a gesture of defiance in a young horse that hadn't been broken in. Metaphorically, the saying serves as an encouragement to wrest back control of a situation from whoever has been forcing you along a certain path so that you can follow the direction you choose for yourself.
    The earliest record of the phrase in print can be found in John Dryden's satirical poem 
The Medal
, published in 1682:

But this new Jehu spurs

the hot-mounted horse,

Instructs the beast to know

his native force,

To take the bit between

his teeth and fly

To the next headlong steep

of anarchy . . .

The saying is still used to encourage people to take control of the direction of their lives by tapping into their innate strength, though these days the bite-sized proverb has been largely replaced by a libraries' worth of self-help books that each take hundreds of pages to make the same point.

   

Something old, something new,
Something borrowed, something blue.

Weddings are one of the ceremonies to which we still attach the most folklore. Rituals which have long been abandoned in other arenas of our lives seem suddenly crucial on our wedding days, as though for one day only, we're willing to do everything within our power to make sure our marriages aren't jinxed. It's superstition that drives it; this saying, which is thought to be Victorian in origin, dictates that a bride must wear or carry something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue with her up the aisle as good-luck charms. Traditionally a woman's wedding dress would have been old, handed down from one generation to the next and altered each time to fit. These days the dress is most likely to be the new item on the list, with a piece of family jewellery serving as something borrowed.
    The addition of something blue may be connected to the Roman custom of dressing brides in blue to symbolize love and purity. Until the nineteenth century it was common for English brides to wear blue rather than white, reflecting the attire of the Virgin Mary to emphasize their modesty. Another rhyme from the Victorian era that reflects this tradition goes: ‘Marry in blue, lover be true.'
    In the original version of the rhyme there is a final line that we tend to omit today: ‘And a silver sixpence in her shoe'. The tradition of a lucky sixpence representing financial security still has a place in today's wedding customs –though it's more likely to be found decorating the wedding cake than in the bride's shoe.

This caution against impatience has been in use since the early nineteenth century, when swimming began to become a popular pastime. Although swimming had been enjoyed by early civilizations, and pools specifically for swimming, rather than simply bathing, were built by the Romans, it fell out of favour in the Middle Ages because of the fear of infection and the role water might play in the spread of disease.
    Even though people in cities blithely drank water from rivers that were also a repository for sewage and other noxious waste, they distrusted the idea of being completely submerged in water. Those who did swim in this era usually used a form of breast stroke that allowed the head to be held high out of the water to avoid contaminated water entering their bodies through the ear. This meant that it wasn't just a fear of drowning that made parents warn their children about staying away from the water until they could swim, they also had to have mastered a stroke that, they hoped, would prevent them from catching anything.
    The phrase appeared in H. G. Bohn's
Handbook of Proverbs
in 1855, from which time at least it has served as a warning against putting yourself in any situation that might be dangerous until you were certain you knew how to handle it. Other phrases serve a similar purpose and in the UK we now tend to prefer ‘Don't try to run before you can walk'.

Sty, sty, leave my eye
Take the next one coming by
.

This ancient remedy for a sty in the eye comes straight from the spell books of medieval wise women. In the Middle Ages few country people could afford to visit an apothecary and, in any case, in the days before antibiotics there was little that could have been done to help cure a sty, which is caused by a bacterial infection. Left to its own devices in the days when the concept of hygiene was unknown, it could have taken several weeks to heal.
    Wise women were the first port of call for people seeking relief from a huge range of maladies – they were experts in the blending of plants and herbs to make cures and many of their remedies were effective because of the medicinal properties in the plants.
    A spell was often used in conjunction with an ointment or potion. In the case of sties, there were various techniques that could be used while reciting an incantation. Some methods suggested rubbing the tail of a black cat over the affected eye nine times, others say a stolen dishcloth should be wiped over the eye and then secretly buried, but if you were serious about getting rid of your sty you had to walk backwards to the crossroads, spit on the ground three times over your right shoulder and then deliver the line ‘Sty, sty, leave my eye; take the next one coming by,' so that the next person to arrive at the crossroads would take your sty from you.

   

This mid-nineteenth-century maxim is used as an assurance in difficult times that once you've experienced misfortune, the same kind of difficulty will never befall you again. It's a rare example of a piece of folklore in which the wisdom about the natural world employed to make the wider point is actually flawed. There is no evidence to suggest that once something, or even someone, has been struck by lightning once, they won't be struck again. In fact, there is plenty of proof of the contrary. American park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck a record seven times between 1942 and 1977 and made it into the  
Guinness Book of Records
. Many tall buildings are struck countless times, which is why the tallest building in an area usually has a lightning conductor on its roof to ground the lightning bolt to prevent it from damaging the structure.
    The reason for this mistaken belief may have its roots in rural communities in the days when buildings were much lower and wouldn't have been struck at all. The most common feature of the early nineteenth-century landscape to absorb a lightning strike would have been trees. And when trees are struck by lightning they usually burn down, which meant that by the time the next electrical storm occurred, they were no longer the tallest structure in the area and wouldn't be struck again.
    We still use the phrase today to comfort people getting over an unpleasant experience, by reassuring them that they are in some way immune from the same bad luck.

   

This saying is thought to have entered English folklore through the French phrase ‘
froides mains, chaudes amours'
, collected in Georges de Backer's
Dictionnaire Des Proverbes François
(1710).
    An early recording of the saying in the English language can be found in V. S. Lean's
Collectanea
, a collection of superstitions and folklore published in 1903, so it is likely that it was in regular use from at least the latter half of the nineteenth century.
    It has also been used traditionally as a playful way of judging whether someone is in love, cold hands being a sure sign that they are. This latter usage has its origins in palmistry, in which a lack of blood flow in the hands is said to indicate that all the warm blood is busy pumping the heart, which is the principal organ of passion. While the link between love and poor circulation does not have a foundation in science, there is a biological basis for the phrase. When exposed to low temperatures or emotional stress that might signify some other source of danger, the body does respond by concentrating the blood flow to the vital organs, which keeps them warm while allowing the less crucial extremities to lose heat until the threat has past. In the most literal sense then, those with cold hands probably do have a warm heart.
    On the other hand, recent scientific research has shown that when a person's hands are warm, he or she is likely to feel warmer and more generous towards other people. Even so, we still often use the saying as a cheering rejoinder if someone finds our hands cold, but it is most frequently applied to people who seem icy but are warm-hearted or passionate beneath their cool exterior, (See also
‘Still waters run deep'
)

While this old proverb clearly has no truth in it, it is a powerful illustration of the way our perception of time passing is affected by the attention we pay it. It is likely to have been in use for years prior to its first appearance in print in Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's ‘Tale of Manchester Life'
Mary Barton
in 1848.
    In the book the phrase is used by a kindly fisherman's wife whose language is peppered with proverbs. She says it to discourage Mary from sitting up all night watching for the arrival of a witness who can prove that the man she loves is innocent of murder. The stakes couldn't be higher and the example demonstrates the way the phrase seems at its most true when whatever you're waiting for really matters.
    Those who first used the saying would have had in mind a cast-iron pot containing water or stew, which if you were hungry or in a hurry to use, might have seemed to take forever to boil on the stove or over an open fire. Electricity has made most kitchen processes much quicker, but we understand the frustrations of longing for things to happen over which we have no control just as well as people did in Gaskell's day, and the phrase is still used to encourage people to find something else to do to take their mind off whatever it is they're waiting for so that the time seems to pass more quickly.